Analysts, Analyst coverage, Analyst forecast, Trading commissions

We identify manager/firm separations where managers quit for a new job and study abnormal returns associated with these events. Applying analyses from labor economics, we argue that the average ability of managers who resign for a similar position at another firm should be higher than that of managers who die suddenly. Controlling for age and tenure, we find that firms losing managers to other firms experience an average abnormal return of −1.51%, compared to +3.82% for firms whose managers die suddenly. We use differences in returns across groups to measure the value of differences in managerial ability.

The “Lake Wobegon Effect,” which is widely cited as a potential cause for rising CEO pay, is said to occur because no firm wants to admit to having a CEO who is below average, and so no firm allows its CEO's pay package to lag market expectations. We develop a game-theoretic model of this Effect. In our model, a CEO's wage may serve as a signal of match surplus, and therefore affect the value of the firm. We compare equilibria of our model to a full-information case and derive conditions under which equilibrium wages are distorted upward.

Multiple-performance-measure agency models predict that optimal contracts should place greater reliance on performance measures that are more precise and more sensitive to the agent's effort. We apply these predictions to CEO retention decisions. First, we develop an agency model to motivate proxies for signal and noise in firm-level performance measures. We then document that accounting information appears to receive greater weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more precise and more sensitive. We also present evidence suggesting that market-based performance measures receive less weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more sensitive or market returns are more variable.

Segment reporting, Competition, Aggregation, Private information

Many recent empirical studies have concluded that analysts' earnings forecasts are optimistic on average. In this paper, we attempt to undo the effect of one potential source of optimistic bias in analysts' earnings forecasts. Assuming forecasts come from a truncated normal distribution, we estimate the “true” population mean using maximum likelihood. We find that our estimates of earnings are more accurate and less biased than standard measures of sample mean and median. However, we do not find a closer relationship between excess market returns and forecast errors from our maximum likelihood estimate than from the sample mean. This may suggest that the market does not fully incorporate analysts' incentives in generating expectations about future earnings.

We provide new evidence on the relation between option-based compensation and risk-taking behavior by exploiting the change in the accounting treatment of stock options following the adoption of FAS 123R in 2005. The implementation of FAS 123R represents an exogenous change in the accounting benefits of stock options that has no effect on the economic costs and benefits of options for providing managerial incentives. Our results do not support the view that the convexity inherent in option-based compensation is used to reduce risk-related agency problems between managers and shareholders. We show that all firms dramatically reduce their usage of stock options (convexity) after the adoption of FAS 123R and that the decline in option use is strongly associated with a proxy for accounting costs. Little evidence exists that the decline in option usage following the accounting change results in less risky investment and financial policies.

We examine the relation between audit committee compensation and the demand for monitoring of the financial reporting process. We find that total compensation and cash retainers paid to audit committees are positively correlated with audit fees and the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, our proxies for the demand for monitoring. Our results are robust to the inclusion of audit committee quality, measured as the committee chair financial expertise. Our results suggest a recent willingness by firms to deviate from the historically prevalent one-size-fits-all approach to director pay in response to increased demands on audit committees and differential director expertise.

We investigate going-private decisions in response to the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). We study firms that go private from 1998 to May 2005 and find: (1) the quarterly frequency of going-private transactions has increased after the passage of SOX, and (2) abnormal returns surrounding both the passage of SOX and the going-private announcement are significantly related to proxies for the costs and benefits of SOX and the net benefits of being a public firm. Our empirical evidence is broadly consistent with the notion that SOX has affected firms’ going-private decisions.