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 examines the determinants and the effects of CEO stock ownership guideline adoption, differentiating Not-meet/Meet adopters – those setting the guideline above/below the CEO’s stock ownership at the time of adoption. While Meet adoption is mainly determined by factors related to stakeholder management, we find that Not-meet adoption is associated with factors related to both incentive alignment and stakeholder management. CEO ownership increases and CEO incentive alignment improves for Not-meet firms. But CEO ownership and incentives are unchanged for Meet firms following guideline adoption. We find no evidence that CEO compensation changes abnormally after adoption. Not-meet firms have larger improvement in operating performance and better stock performance than Meet firms. We provide evidence that the motives and the effects of guideline adoption depend on the level of the ownership restriction relative to the CEO’s ownership at the time of adoption.

We examine the relation between CEO delta, firm locality, and firm value for a sample of 7749 firm-year observations. We find that CEO delta is more value-enhancing for rural firms, those associated with exacerbated agency conflicts resulting from decreased observability of managerial investment decisions and higher levels of information asymmetry. Further, the positive relation between CEO delta and firm value is stronger for rural firms with higher levels of information asymmetry or in less religious areas. Our findings imply that managerial ownership is more effective in mitigating agency conflicts in rural areas with higher levels of information asymmetry and lower degrees of local trustworthy constituents. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of urban/rural firms, the inclusion of additional control variables, and various tests controlling the endogeneity between firm location and value. Finally, the results do not appear to be driven by reverse causality.