Engel/Hayes/Wang and Farrell/Whidbee provide new evidence on how firms weight alternative performance measures in making CEO retention and replacement decisions. While their results are statistically significant, firm performance continues to explain very little of the variation in CEO turnover. I argue we have probably reached a point of diminishing returns in estimating logit models that focus on the relation between CEO turnover and firm performance measures. We will have to consider other less-explored issues to increase our understanding of CEO turnovers and replacements. Analyzing age-related issues is one example.

James A. Brickley, Interpreting Common Stock Returns around Proxy Statement Disclosures and Annual Shareholder Meetings, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 343-349

James A. Brickley, Discussion: Empirical Evidence on Dividends as a Signal of Firm Value, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 4, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 16-19, 1982, Portland, Oregon (Nov., 1982), pp. 501-502

This paper examines common stock returns and dividend and earnings patterns surrounding specially designated dividends labeled by management as ‘extra’, ‘special’ or ‘year-end’ and compares them to those surrounding regular (unlabeled) dividend increases. The results support the notion that management uses the labeling of dividend increases to convey information to the market about the future potential of the firm. Unlabeled increases appear to contain the most positive information. Contrary to the sometimes suggested view, specially designated dividends appear to convey positive information about future dividends and earnings beyond that relating to the current period.

Firms that alter their divisional configurations on average increase shareholder wealth. Gains appear to come from information about investment opportunities and increases in efficiency. Performance before the restructurings suggests poorly organized firms are motivated by market pressures to change their organizations. Change also occurs in healthy firms as part of the growth process. Restructuring often occurs where there is no evidence of takeover threats. While stock prices increase around the restructurings, there is a contemporaneous decline in earnings due to increased expenses. These findings appear inconsistent with the contention that the market pressures managers into focusing on short-run earnings.

We examine companies that franchise some units and centrally operate (‘own’) others. The agency problems confronting these two organizational forms are analyzed. Testable hypotheses are developed. The empirical results support the notion that owning versus franchising reflects a trade-off among agency-related problems. The cost of monitoring store managers appears to be especially important in the own/franchise decision. The level of repeat business and initial investment requirements per unit also appear to be important.

Multi-bank holding companies file detailed financial statements on their subsidiary banks. The availability of these data allows for an empirical examination of the relation between accounting-based performance and personnel decision for lower-level managers. For our sample of Texas banks, we find that turnover of subsidiary bank managers is negatively related to subsidiary performance, while promotions are positively related to performance. Holding own-bank performance constant, turnover increases with holding-company performance, which is consistent with the view that turnover decisions are based on performance relative to a firm-specification benchmark.

Some argue that managers effectively control corporate voting: hence the process is meaningless. Others contend that shareholder voting motivates managers to maximize firm value. We provide evidence on this debate by analyzing the results from a large sample of management-sponsored anti-takeover amendments. Our results do not support the extreme form of either hypothesis. The evidence suggests that shareholder voting is important and indicates the circumstances where voting is most likely to constrain managers. Our results also have implications for the use of voting in political and other non-corporate contexts.