Analysts, Analyst coverage, Analyst forecast, Trading commissions

The “Lake Wobegon Effect,” which is widely cited as a potential cause for rising CEO pay, is said to occur because no firm wants to admit to having a CEO who is below average, and so no firm allows its CEO's pay package to lag market expectations. We develop a game-theoretic model of this Effect. In our model, a CEO's wage may serve as a signal of match surplus, and therefore affect the value of the firm. We compare equilibria of our model to a full-information case and derive conditions under which equilibrium wages are distorted upward.

Multiple-performance-measure agency models predict that optimal contracts should place greater reliance on performance measures that are more precise and more sensitive to the agent's effort. We apply these predictions to CEO retention decisions. First, we develop an agency model to motivate proxies for signal and noise in firm-level performance measures. We then document that accounting information appears to receive greater weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more precise and more sensitive. We also present evidence suggesting that market-based performance measures receive less weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more sensitive or market returns are more variable.

Many recent empirical studies have concluded that analysts' earnings forecasts are optimistic on average. In this paper, we attempt to undo the effect of one potential source of optimistic bias in analysts' earnings forecasts. Assuming forecasts come from a truncated normal distribution, we estimate the “true” population mean using maximum likelihood. We find that our estimates of earnings are more accurate and less biased than standard measures of sample mean and median. However, we do not find a closer relationship between excess market returns and forecast errors from our maximum likelihood estimate than from the sample mean. This may suggest that the market does not fully incorporate analysts' incentives in generating expectations about future earnings.

We investigate going-private decisions in response to the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). We study firms that go private from 1998 to May 2005 and find: (1) the quarterly frequency of going-private transactions has increased after the passage of SOX, and (2) abnormal returns surrounding both the passage of SOX and the going-private announcement are significantly related to proxies for the costs and benefits of SOX and the net benefits of being a public firm. Our empirical evidence is broadly consistent with the notion that SOX has affected firms’ going-private decisions.

We document that employee bankruptcy costs affect corporate capital structure decisions via their impact on the bargaining power of labor unions. We employ difference-in-differences and triple-difference research designs surrounding a major bankruptcy reform that increased personal bankruptcy costs. Our results suggest that, on average, this reform reduced unions’ bargaining power, resulting in a decrease in the financial leverage of unionized firms relative to nonunionized firms. Our results provide new evidence for a relatively unexplored determinant of capital structure—personal bankruptcy costs.

We use complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to study the interplay between social norms and the effectiveness of consumer protection laws. We find that a higher level of trust in a given location is associated with a lower number of complaints filed against financial institutions in that location. Employing a difference‐in‐differences approach, we further find that, after the establishment of the CFPB, banks in low‐trust areas reduce fees charged to consumers more compared to banks in high‐trust areas. Our results suggest that the threat of consumer complaints to a government agency affects how banks treat their customers, and they shed light on the interaction between informal culture and formal institutions, as well as on stakeholders’ influence in corporate policies.

This paper analyzes annual corporate governance decisions at firms making initial public offerings (IPOs) of common stock between 1996 and 1999. Our objective is to examine relations between firms’ corporate governance decisions and the informativeness of available measures of managerial performance. We consider financial measures such as earnings and stock return, as well as direct monitoring. We collect a sample of IPO firms from the manufacturing, Internet, and technology (non‐Internet) industries, and examine how the use of various performance measures in annual compensation grants and turnover decisions varies with the information environment of the firm and with the extent of venture capital influence. Consistent with prior research that finds earnings are of limited usefulness in firm valuation for Internet firms, we find Internet firms place less importance on earnings and greater importance on stock returns in determining compensation grants than do non‐Internet firms. We also find that compensation grants of firms with little or no venture capital influence display significantly stronger association with accounting and stock performance measures than those of firms with more intense monitoring by venture capitalists. This result is consistent with direct monitoring and the use of explicit performance measures acting as substitute governance mechanisms.

We examine the effects of banking deregulation on bank board policies—specifically, whether deregulation affects the performance and risk exposure measures used in bank CEO turnover decisions. Using the staggered adoption of interstate branching as our setting, we find that bank CEO turnover is more (less) sensitive to stock (accounting) performance after deregulation. We also find that deregulation is associated with a higher sensitivity of bank CEO turnover to the idiosyncratic component of tail risk. Moreover, such changes in turnover policies primarily exist in large banks and federally chartered banks, which are best positioned to exploit growth opportunities, and in banks that expand branch operations after deregulation. Our results indicate an increased emphasis on stock performance and tail risk in turnover decisions when growth opportunities are greater in the deregulated environment. The findings provide evidence that the information used in board decisions varies with features of the competitive environment.