This study provides empirical evidence that firms with larger boards have lower variability of corporate performance. The results indicate that board size is negatively associated with the variability of monthly stock returns, annual accounting return on assets, Tobin's Q, accounting accruals, extraordinary items, analyst forecast inaccuracy, and R&D spending, the level of R&D expenditures, and the frequency of acquisition and restructuring activities. The results are consistent with the view that it takes more compromises for a larger board to reach consensus, and consequently, decisions of larger boards are less extreme, leading to less variable corporate performance.

This paper derives a pricing model for employee stock options (ESO) that includes default risk and considers employee sentiment. Using ESO data from 1992 to 2004, the study finds that the average executive's subjective value is about 55% of the Black-Scholes value. Only employees who over-estimate firm returns (or insiders who know that the firm is under-valued) by about 10% per annum will prefer ESOs over cash compensation. Our model also shows that work incentives offered by ESOs may be far lower than those implied by Black-Scholes but that ESOs may induce less risk-taking behavior, contrary to typical moral hazard arguments. Findings may impact relevant accounting regulations as well as compensation decisions.

Prior research finds that earnings restatements are linked to CEOs’ excessive option-based compensation and equity holdings. In this paper, we investigate whether firms that experience earnings restatements recontract with their CEOs to reduce their option-based compensation and if so, whether this leads to improved firm performance. Based on 289 restatement firms over the period 1997–2001, we find that the proportion of CEOs’ compensation in the form of options declines significantly in the two years following the restatement. Furthermore, we document that this reduction is accompanied by a decrease in the riskiness of investments, as reflected in lower stock return volatility and subsequent improvements in operating performance. Our results suggest that a decrease in option-based compensation reduces CEOs’ incentives to take excessively risky investments, resulting in improved profitability. Overall, our findings provide insights into the design and efficacy of CEO compensation contracts.

We examine the voluntary disclosure practices of family firms. We find that, compared to nonfamily firms, family firms provide fewer earnings forecasts and conference calls, but more earnings warnings. Whereas the former is consistent with family owners having a longer investment horizon, better monitoring of management, and lower information asymmetry between owners and managers, the higher likelihood of earnings warnings is consistent with family owners having greater litigation and reputation cost concerns. We also document that family ownership dominates nonfamily insider ownership and concentrated institutional ownership in explaining the likelihood of voluntary disclosure. Using alternative proxies for the founding family's presence in the firm leads to similar results.

There is limited direct evidence on the impact of analyst coverage on the cost of capital. In this paper, we hypothesize that the amount and nature of analyst coverage can reduce information asymmetry among investors and thus lower the cost of raising equity capital. We investigate the effect of analyst coverage on the underpricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), which is a substantial cost of issuing new shares. Based on 4,766 SEOs in the period 1984-2000, our results suggest that more analyst coverage is associated with lower SEO underpricing. Compared with firms without analyst coverage, firms with the median level of analyst coverage - three analysts - have a 1.19% lower SEO underpricing, a relative decrease of 38%. This effect is robust to controlling for other factors affecting SEO underpricing. We also examine additional attributes of analyst coverage and find that firms followed by analysts working for the lead underwriter, with a reputation for superior ability, or with lower forecast dispersion have incrementally lower SEO underpricing.

With the recent significant growth in the single-name credit default swap (CDS) market has come the need for accurate and computationally efficient models to value these instruments. While the model developed by Duffie, Pan, and Singleton (2000) can be used, the solution is numerical (solving a series of ordinary differential equations) rather than explicit. In this paper, we provide an explicit solution to the valuation of a credit default swap when the interest rate and the hazard rate are correlated by using the “change of measure” approach and solving a bivariate Riccati equation. CDS transaction data for the period 2/15/2000 through 4/8/2003 for 60 firms are used to test both the goodness of fit of the model and provide estimates of the influence of economic variables in the market for credit-risky bonds.