Knowledge that Transforms

We study optimal compensation in a dynamic framework where the CEO consumes in multiple periods, can undo the contract by privately saving, and can temporarily inflate earnings. We obtain a simple closed‐form contract that yields clear predictions for how the level and performance sensitivity of pay vary over time and across firms. The contract can be implemented by escrowing the CEO's pay into a “Dynamic Incentive Account” that comprises cash and the firm's equity. The account features state‐dependent rebalancing to ensure its equity proportion is always sufficient to induce effort, and time‐dependent vesting to deter short‐termism.

We develop a bid‐ask spread estimator from daily high and low prices. Daily high (low) prices are almost always buy (sell) trades. Hence, the high–low ratio reflects both the stock's variance and its bid‐ask spread. Although the variance component of the high–low ratio is proportional to the return interval, the spread component is not. This allows us to derive a spread estimator as a function of high–low ratios over 1‐day and 2‐day intervals. The estimator is easy to calculate, can be applied in a variety of research areas, and generally outperforms other low‐frequency estimators.

We provide new evidence on the role of financial advisors in M&As. Contrary to prior studies, top‐tier advisors deliver higher bidder returns than their non‐top‐tier counterparts but in public acquisitions only, where the advisor reputational exposure and required skills set are relatively larger. This translates into a $65.83 million shareholder gain for an average bidder. The improvement comes from top‐tier advisors' ability to identify more synergistic combinations and to get a larger share of synergies to accrue to bidders. Consistent with the premium price–premium quality equilibrium, top‐tier advisors charge premium fees in these transactions.

We develop a dynamic agency model in which payout, investment, and financing decisions are made by managers who attempt to maximize the rents they take from the firm, subject to a capital market constraint. Managers smooth payout to smooth their flow of rents. Total payout (dividends plus net repurchases) follows Lintner's (1956) target adjustment model. Payout smooths out transitory shocks to current income and adjusts gradually to changes in permanent income. Smoothing is accomplished by borrowing or lending. Payout is not cut back to finance capital investment. Risk aversion causes managers to underinvest, but habit formation mitigates the degree of underinvestment.

This paper uses novel data to examine the fleets of corporate jets operated by both publicly traded and privately held firms. In the cross‐section, firms owned by private equity funds average 40% smaller fleets than observably similar public firms. Similar fleet reductions are observed within firms that undergo leveraged buyouts. Quantile regressions indicate that these results are driven by firms in the upper 30% of the conditional jet distribution. The results thus suggest that executives in a substantial minority of public firms enjoy excessive perquisite and compensation packages.

Private equity has traditionally been thought to provide diversification benefits. However, these benefits may be lower than anticipated as we find that private equity suffers from significant exposure to the same liquidity risk factor as public equity and other alternative asset classes. The unconditional liquidity risk premium is about 3% annually and, in a four‐factor model, the inclusion of this liquidity risk premium reduces alpha to zero. In addition, we provide evidence that the link between private equity returns and overall market liquidity occurs via a funding liquidity channel.

This paper studies the default risk of banks generated by investment and remuneration pressures. Competing banks prefer to pay their banking staff in bonuses and not in fixed wages as risk sharing on the remuneration bill is valuable. Competition for bankers generates a negative externality, driving up market levels of banker remuneration and hence rival banks’ default risk. Optimal financial regulation involves an appropriately structured limit on the proportion of the balance sheet used for bonuses. However, stringent bonus caps are value destroying, default risk enhancing, and suboptimal for regulators who control only a small number of banks.

According to conventional wisdom, annualized volatility of stock returns is lower over long horizons than over short horizons, due to mean reversion induced by return predictability. In contrast, we find that stocks are substantially more volatile over long horizons from an investor's perspective. This perspective recognizes that parameters are uncertain, even with two centuries of data, and that observable predictors imperfectly deliver the conditional expected return. Mean reversion contributes strongly to reducing long‐horizon variance but is more than offset by various uncertainties faced by the investor. The same uncertainties reduce desired stock allocations of long‐horizon investors contemplating target‐date funds.

Because of non‐traded human capital, real‐world financial markets are massively incomplete, while the modeling of imperfect, dynamic financial markets remains a wide‐open and difficult field. Some 30 years after Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) taught us how to calculate the prices of derivative securities on an event tree by simple backward induction, we show how a similar formulation can be used in computing heterogeneous‐agents incomplete‐market equilibrium prices of primitive securities. Extant methods work forward and backward, requiring a guess of the way investors forecast the future. In our method, the future is part of the current solution of each backward time step.

We show that firms intermediating trade have incentives to overinvest in financial expertise. In our model, expertise improves firms’ ability to estimate value when trading a security. Expertise creates asymmetric information, which, under normal circumstances, works to the advantage of the expert as it deters opportunistic bargaining by counterparties. This advantage is neutralized in equilibrium, however, by offsetting investments by competitors. Moreover, when volatility rises the adverse selection created by expertise triggers breakdowns in liquidity, destroying gains to trade and thus the benefits that firms hope to gain through high levels of expertise.