Business Commons^™

The Importance Of Executive Effort, Lee Edward Biggerstaff

Doctoral Dissertations

Agency theory stipulates that managerial effort is important to shareholders and costly for managers to provide. Executives may provide sub-optimal levels of effort because shareholders cannot easily observe the day-to-day actions of managers and therefore have difficulties properly monitoring the effort provided by firm management. Researchers also face the challenge of measuring executive effort. In this dissertation, I use an observable measure of leisure consumption to proxy for the effort provided by executives to study the impact of executive effort on firm outcomes.

In the first essay, I focus on Chief Executive Officers (“CEOs”) and the impact of their effort …

Politically Connected Analysts, Michael B. Mcdonald

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines politically-connected equity analysts, i.e., analysts that make large political donations. I find that these big donor analysts make more accurate earnings forecasts than other small donor and non-donor analysts, and the accuracy of these forecasts decreases after a big donor analyst ceases his donations. These analysts become more accurate after they become large political donors, suggesting their enhanced performance derives from an advantage gained via their political activity. These results are stronger when (i) the analyst works or lives in the state represented by the benefiting politician, and (ii) the benefiting politician serves on a Congressional committee …