Whether equity-based compensation and equity ownership align the interests of managers with stockholders is an important question in finance. Early studies found an inverted U-shaped relation between managerial ownership and firm value, but later studies using firm fixed effects found no relation. Managerial ownership levels change very slowly over time which may mask an ownership effect on firm value when using a fixed effect model. This is due to a much smaller within firm variation than between firm variation. We demonstrate that using pay-performance semi-elasticity, rather than pay-performance sensitivity as a measure of managerial ownership incentives, results in meaningful variation within firm over time. The greater within firm variation increases the power to detect a relation between managerial ownership and firm value with fixed effect regressions. As in the early research on this issue, we find a significant inverted U-shaped relation between managerial ownership and Tobin's Q in fixed effects regressions and after controlling for endogeneity with both two-stage and three-stage least squares regressions. Our results are consistent with incentive alignment at low levels and risk aversion at high levels of managerial ownership.

This paper evaluates the stock market effects of events leading to the passage of the Financial Institutions Reforms, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989. The evidence suggests that the signing of the Act by President Bush produced positive abnormal returns for both banks and S&Ls and that the addition of tougher capital standards produced positive returns for S&Ls. In addition, the Act increased the risk of both banks and S&Ls.

Grounded in agency theory, this study investigates how the strength of shareholder rights influences the extent of firm diversification and the excess value attributable to diversification. The empirical evidence reveals that the strength of shareholder rights is inversely related to the probability to diversify. Furthermore, firms where shareholder rights are more suppressed by restrictive corporate governance suffer a deeper diversification discount. Specifically, we document a 1.1–1.4% decline in firm value for each additional governance provision imposed on shareholders. An explicit distinction is made between global and industrial diversification. Our results support agency theory as an explanation for the value reduction in diversified firms. The evidence in favor of agency theory appears to be more pronounced for industrial diversification than for global diversification.