We compare executive equity incentives of firms accused of accounting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the period 1996–2003 with two samples of firms not accused of fraud. We measure equity incentives in a variety of ways and employ a battery of empirical tests. We find no consistent evidence that executive equity incentives are associated with fraud. These results stand in contrast to assertions by policy makers that incentives from stock-based compensation and the resulting equity holdings increase the likelihood of accounting fraud.

Consistent with a life-cycle theory of dividends, the fraction of publicly traded industrial firms that pay dividends is high when retained earnings are a large portion of total equity (and of total assets) and falls to near zero when most equity is contributed rather than earned. We observe a highly significant relation between the decision to pay dividends and the earned/contributed capital mix, controlling for profitability, growth, firm size, total equity, cash balances, and dividend history, a relation that also holds for dividend initiations and omissions. In our regressions, the mix of earned/contributed capital has a quantitatively greater impact than measures of profitability and growth opportunities. We document a massive increase in firms with negative retained earnings (from 11.8% of industrials in 1978 to 50.2% in 2002). Controlling for the earned/contributed capital mix, firms with negative retained earnings show virtually no change in their propensity to pay dividends from the mid-1970s to 2002, while those whose earned equity makes them reasonable candidates to pay dividends have a propensity reduction that is twice the overall reduction in Fama and French [2000, Journal of Financial Economics 76, 549–582]. Finally, our simulations show that, if well-established firms had not paid dividends, their cash balances would be enormous and their long-term debt trivial, thus granting extreme discretion to managers of these mature firms.

We provide empirical evidence of a strong causal relation between managerial compensation and investment policy, debt policy, and firm risk. Controlling for CEO pay-performance sensitivity (delta) and the feedback effects of firm policy and risk on the managerial compensation scheme, we find that higher sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock volatility (vega) implements riskier policy choices, including relatively more investment in R&D, less investment in PPE, more focus, and higher leverage. We also find that riskier policy choices generally lead to compensation structures with higher vega and lower delta. Stock-return volatility has a positive effect on both vega and delta.

The Monetary Control Act of 1980 requires the Federal Reserve System to provide payment services to depository institutions through the 12 Federal Reserve Banks at prices that fully reflect the costs a private-sector provider would incur, including a cost of equity capital (COE). Although Fama and French [Fama, E.F., French, K.R., 1997. Industry costs of equity. Journal of Financial Economics 43, 153–193] conclude that COE estimates are “woefully” and “unavoidably” imprecise, the Reserve Banks require such an estimate every year. We examine several COE estimates based on the CAPM model and compare them using econometric and materiality criteria. Our results suggest that the benchmark CAPM model applied to a large peer group of competing firms provides a COE estimate that is not clearly improved upon by using a narrow peer group, introducing additional factors into the model, or taking account of additional firm-level data, such as leverage and line-of-business concentration. Thus, a standard implementation of the benchmark CAPM model provides a reasonable COE estimate, which is needed to impute costs and set prices for the Reserve Banks’ payments business.

We examine whether CEO turnover and succession patterns vary with firm complexity. Specifically, we compare CEO turnover in diversified versus focused firms. We find that CEO turnover in diversified firms is completely insensitive to both accounting and stock-price performance, but CEO turnover in focused firms is sensitive to firm performance. Diversified firms also experience less forced turnover than focused firms. Following turnover, replacement CEOs in diversified firms are older, more educated, and are paid more when hired. Collectively, our results indicate that the labor market for CEOs is different across diversified and focused firms and that firm complexity and scope affect CEO succession.

Prior studies suggest that venture capitalists (VCs) play a monitoring role. We predict and find that IPO-year abnormal accruals are lower in the presence of VCs for a sample of 2,630 IPO firms during 1983–2001. Our findings are robust to controls for the endogenous choice of VC financing. We consistently find that the VC effect holds even when controlling for IPO lock-up provisions, VC partial cashing out subsequent to the IPO, and alternative proxies for earnings management. In addition, our findings do not support the claims of critics that VCs inflated earnings during the Internet IPO bubble. Finally, we provide some evidence that the lower earnings management associated with VC monitoring partially explains the superior post-IPO returns of VC-backed firms.

Simulation methods are extensively used in Asset Pricing and Risk Management. The most popular of these simulation approaches, the Monte Carlo, requires model selection and parameter estimation. In addition, these approaches can be extremely computer intensive. Historical simulation has been proposed as a non-parametric alternative to Monte Carlo. This approach is limited to the historical data available. In this paper, we propose an alternative historical simulation approach. Given a historical set of data, we define a set of standardized disturbances and we generate alternative price paths by perturbing the first two moments of the original path or by reshuffling the disturbances. This approach is either totally non-parametric when constant volatility is assumed; or semi-parametric in presence of GARCH(1,1) volatility. Without a loss in accuracy, it is shown to be much more powerful in terms of computer efficiency than the Monte Carlo approach. It is also extremely simple to implement and can be an effective tool for the valuation of financial assets. We apply this approach to simulate pay off values of options on the S&P 500 stock index for the period 1982–2003. To verify that this technique works, the common back-testing approach was used. The estimated values are insignificantly different from the actual S&P 500 options payoff values for the observed period.

This paper examines the shareholder wealth effects of bids by controlling shareholders seeking to acquire the remaining minority equity stake in a firm, deals commonly referred to as minority freeze-outs. Minority claimants in freeze-out offers receive an allocation of deal surplus at the bid announcement that exceeds their pro rata claim on the firm. An analysis of bid outcomes and renegotiation indicates that minority claimants and their agents exercise significant bargaining power during freeze-out proposals. Overall, our results suggest that legal standards and economic incentives are sufficient to deter self-dealing by controllers during freeze-out bids.

The staged financing hypothesis of Mayers [Mayers, D., 1998. Why firms issue convertible bonds: The matching of financial and real investment options. Journal of Financial Economics 47, 83–102] predicts that investment and financing activity will increase following in the money convertible bond calls. The prediction for out of the money convertible calls is different: no increase is expected. We study the rate of both corporate investment and external financing around forced conversions using benchmarks that are analogous to those recommended by Barber and Lyon [Barber, B., Lyon, J., 1996. Detecting abnormal operating performance: The empirical power and specification of test statistics. Journal of Financial Economics 41, 359–400]. We also examine the cross-section of changes in investment and financing activity. Conversion-forcing firms exhibit an increase in both capital expenditures and debt financing around the year of the convertible bond call; however, the same result holds for the sample firms that conducted out-of-the-money convertible calls. Further, there is no relation between changes in investment activity and changes in debt issuance at the firm level. The evidence is inconsistent with the notion that forced conversions serve as a catalyst for staged financing and investment.

We propose a framework for understanding episodes of vigorous economic expansion and extreme asset valuations. We interpret this phenomenon as a high-valuation equilibrium with a low cost of capital based on optimism about future funding. The key ingredient for such equilibrium is feedback from increased growth to a decline in the long-run cost of capital. This feedback arises when an expansion comes with technological progress in the capital sector, when fiscal rules generate procyclical fiscal surpluses, when the rest of the world has lower expansion potential or high saving needs, and when financial constraints are relaxed by the expansion itself.