Business Commons^™

Contracting With Controllable Risk, Christopher S. Armstrong, Stephen A. Glaeser, Sterling Huang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine how executives' ability to control their firms' exposure to risk affects the design of their incentive-compensation contracts. Our natural experimental evidence shows that exchange-traded weather derivatives allow executives to control their firms' exposure to weather risk. Once these derivatives became available, those executives who use them to hedge experience relative reductions in their total compensation and equity incentives. The decline in compensation is consistent with a reduction in the risk premium that executives receive for exposure to weather risk. The decline in equity incentives is consistent with the relation between risk and incentives shifting in a complementary direction …

Big Bath Earnings Management In Accounting, Shannon Danysh-Hashemi

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study examines the potential use of big bath earnings management (BBEM) techniques in the leisure and travel industries during the pandemic of 2020. Data is collected through Compustat and Mergent Online databases and then merged for analysis using SPSS 27. First, the preliminary t-test shows the possibility of the firms in these industries to have conducted BBEM. After, modified Jone's model is used to distinguish discretionary from non-discretionary accruals. Using multiple regression analysis, three hypotheses are tested to discover whether the year of the pandemic, political costs, and executive compensation had any significant effect on the use of discretionary …

The Relationship Between Perceived Fairness In Executive Compensation And Managerial Behavior, Kainan Xiong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines the relationship between the perceived fairness in executive compensation and the level of earnings management on the one hand and the propensity for voluntary turnover on the other. Executive compensation has attracted significant academic attention for more than two decades. The ratcheting-up of executive pay raises questions about its determinants and whether the pay-setting process effectively promotes managerial behavior that aligns with the interests of shareholders. Alternatively, executives may simply extract rents at the expense of shareholders because of the informational advantage that they have and their influence over the board of directors, particularly the compensation committee …

The Choice Of Peers For Relative Performance Evaluation In Executive Compensation, Zhichuan Li, John Bizjak, Swaminathan Kalpathy, Brian Young

Business Publications

Relative performance (RPE) awards have become an important component of executive compensation. We examine whether RPE awards, particularly the peer group, are structured in a manner consistent with economic theory. For RPE awards using a custom peer group, we find that the custom group is significantly more effective than four plausible alternative peer groups at filtering out common shocks, lowering the cost of compensation, and increasing managerial incentives. For RPE awards using a market index, we find some evidence that firms could have selected a custom set of peers with better filtering properties at a lower cost with similar incentives. …

Managers' Pay Duration And Voluntary Disclosures, Qiang Cheng, Young Jun Cho, Jae B. Kim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Given the adverse effect on their welfare, managers are reluctant to disclose bad news in a timely fashion. We examine the effect of managers' pay duration on firms' voluntary disclosures of bad news. Pay duration refers to the average period that it takes for managers' annual compensation to vest. We hypothesize and find that pay durations can incentivize managers to provide more bad news earnings forecasts. This result holds after controlling for the endogeneity of pay duration. In addition, we find that the effect of pay duration is more pronounced for firms with weaker governance and with poorer information environments, …

Executive Compensation And Firm Performance In New Zealand: The Role Of Employee Stock Option Plans, David K. Ding, Ya Eem Chea

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the role of employee stock option plans (ESOPs) in mitigating agency problems in New Zealand firms. We find that ESOPs have a significant and positive effect on firm performance relative to their non-ESOP counterparts. This relation appears within a year from the first ESOP announcement, and for two to four years after the announcement. Our results show that ESOPs improve corporate performance by 10 times the cost of the ESOPs’ adoption in the first year of issue. The improvement persists for four years after the first issuance. These findings confirm the effectiveness of employee stock option plans for …

Corporate Social Responsibility And Ceo Risk-Taking Incentives, Zhichuan Li

Business Publications

We examine how firms adjust CEO risk-taking incentives in response to risk environments associated with their corporate social responsibility (CSR) standing. We find strong evidence that as a firm's CSR status improves (declines), increasing (decreasing) its risk-taking capacity, the firm responds by adjusting compensation contracts to increase (decrease) CEO risk-taking incentives (Vega). One channel of the adjustment is through stock option grants. Further analyses indicate that the positive CSR-Vega association is stronger in firms with better corporate governance and in industries where riskiness is more important. Our evidence indicates that firms are not passive in response to changes in CSR …

The Effects Of Ceo Dismissal Risk And Skills On Risky Corporate Decisions And Ceo Compensation, Son T. Dang

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation consists of three distinct essays on the effects of CEO dismissal risk on M&A megadeal decisions, the association between CEO compensation and generalist managerial ability in the presence of CEO dismissal risk, and the alignment of the initial compensation of new CEOs following CEO dismissals with their managerial ability.

In Essay 1, I study the link between CEO dismissal risk and risky M&A decisions and find that higher-dismissal-risk CEOs engage in more M&A megadeals than their counterparts. Such megadeal transactions lead to lower acquirer post-M&A abnormal returns, suggesting that risky investment decisions are driven by CEOs’ career concerns. …

The Role Of Mutual Funds In Corporate Social Responsibility, Zhichuan Li, Saurin Patel, Srikanth Ramani

Business Publications

This paper examines the role of mutual funds in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a fund-level, holdings-based CSR score, we find that CSR-friendly mutual funds improve firms’ CSR standings. This effect is more pronounced for firms with higher mutual fund ownership and stronger corporate governance. We further show that while CSR-friendly mutual funds have influence on almost all CSR categories, they focus on increasing CSR strengths rather than reducing CSR concerns. We also discover that CSR-friendly funds are more likely to vote in favor of CSR proposals, and that firms owned by CSR-friendly funds are more likely to link their …

Managerial Attributes, Incentives, And Performance, Zhichuan Li, Jeffrey L. Coles

Business Publications

We examine the relative importance of observed and unobserved firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in determining executive compensation incentives and firm policy, risk, and performance. First, we decompose executive incentives into time-variant and time-invariant firm and manager components. Manager fixed effects supply 73% (60%) of explained variation in delta (vega). Second, controlling for manager fixed effects alters parameter estimates and corresponding inference on observed firm and manager characteristics. Third, larger CEO delta (vega) fixed effects predict better firm performance (riskier corporate policies and higher firm risk). These results suggest that the delta (vega) fixed effect captures managerial ability (risk aversion).

Vega, Capital Ratios, And Real Estate Lending, Muna Alsheikh

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

The 2007 financial crisis revealed how excessive bank risk threatens financial system stability. This paper studies two aspects of the risk-taking incentives of banks– CEO compensation and capital. The vega of a bank executive’s equity compensation measures how compensation changes relative to the banks’ stock volatility. If CEO compensation vega is high, I expect the CEO to take more risk in areas where he exercises control. Conversely, if regulators demand that banks invest their own capital to encourage conservative behavior, then I expect risk-taking to be lower. This paper confirms that higher vega and lower capital ratios are associated with …

Csr-Contingent Executive Compensation Contracts, Zhichuan Li

Business Publications

Firms have increasingly started tying their executives’ compensation to CSR-related objectives. In this paper, we attempt to understand why firms offer CSR-contingent compensation and the conditions under which such compensation improves corporate social performance. Using hand-collected data from proxy statements, we find that this emerging compensation practice varies significantly across industries and across different CSR categories. Further, well-governed firms are more likely to offer CSR-contingent compensation, and such compensation does lead to higher corporate social standing. Such firms are more likely to offer formula-based, Objective CSR-contingent compensation. However, our results suggest that non-formulaic, Subjective CSR-contingent compensation also helps improve companies’ …

The Evolution Of Private Equity And The Change In General Partner Compensation Terms In The 1980s, Stephen Fraidin, Meredith Foster

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

While the business model of private equity has remained largely unchanged since the 1980s, private equity as an industry has undergone a dramatic transformation. In the early 1980s, private equity was both highly profitable and highly controversial. Today, on the other hand, it is an important asset class and its returns are modest. This paper will document both of these changes and identify the several factors that contributed simultaneously to private equity’s declining profitability and to its increasing public acceptance. This paper will also identify another change that private equity underwent in the 1980s, which has been largely ignored: the …

Securities Disclosure As Soundbite: The Case Of Ceo Pay Ratios, Steven A. Bank, George S. Georgiev

Faculty Articles

This Article analyzes the history, design, and effectiveness of the highly controversial CEO pay ratio disclosure rule, which went into effect in 2018. Based on a regulatory mandate contained in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the rule requires public companies to disclose the ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay as part of their annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The seven-year rulemaking process was politically contentious and generated a level of public engagement that was virtually unprecedented in the long history of the SEC disclosure regime. The SEC sought to minimize compliance costs by providing …

Compensation Clawback Policies And Corporate Lawsuits, Matteo Arena, Nga Nguyen

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between compensation clawbacks and lawsuits and analyze how these two corporate disciplinary forces interact. This paper hypothesizes that by allowing firms to recoup compensation from managers who breach their fiduciary duty, clawbacks provide a form of discipline that potentially reduces the likelihood of managerial wrongdoing, which, in turn, lowers the risk of corporate lawsuits.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper identifies whether or not a company in the S&P 1500 had a clawback policy between 2007 and 2014 by searching the company filings and press releases. The authors also construct different proxies …

Occupational Fraud: Executive Compensation And Enforcements Against Auditors And Perpetrators., Erlina Papakroni

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation is comprised of three studies that examine the association of executive compensation with financial statement fraud and enforcements pursued against the independent auditor and the principal perpetrators when occupational fraud is detected.

The first study examines competing, though non-mutually exclusive, hypotheses for the path that equity compensation follows on its way to financial misreporting. We find that firms that experience financial statement fraud pay their executives higher levels and a higher proportion of equity compensation across the entire executive’s tenure. This starts in the first year of an executive’s tenure and continues up until the fraud period. These …

Are Women Executives Hurting Firm Performance? An Examination Of Gender Diversity On Firm Risk, Performance, And Executive Compensation, Krystal Diane Sung

CMC Senior Theses

In order to assess the continuing imbalance of top executives between genders, I examine the effects of gender diversity within top management teams on firm risk, performance, and executive compensation. Capitalizing on previous analysis, I apply three unique differentiators. First, I utilize current data from 2012 to 2017 from Compustat, CRSP, and ExecuComp. Second, I provide a unique subset view on a firm and individual performance of female CEOs to examine executive compensation. Third, my scope of analysis expands to S&P Composite 1500 companies. I use separate models to estimate the effect of gender diversity on firm risk by examining …

Serving Others At The Expense Of Self: The Relationship Between Nonprofit Ceo Compensation And Performance In Trade And Professional Associations, Marina Saitgalina, Andrew A. Bennett, Christopher S. Reina, Joseph E. Coombs

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the organizational importance of relative CEO compensation in trade associations and professional societies. It is known that there is variation in how much pay is tied to performance in different subcategories of nonprofit organizations. However, instead of looking at how performance affects pay, we investigate how CEO compensation affects organization performance when CEOs are aware of their peer compensation and are able to influence their own. We hypothesized that CEOs who knowingly earn less will be associated with both greater financial and nonfinancial organizational performance. This altruistic perspective draws on theories from leadership and psychology rather than …

Relationship Between Federal Compliance Complexities And Internal Control Infraction, Laurence Richard Brown

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the nonprofit industry, lapses in internal controls and low levels of accountability have resulted in many organizations becoming insolvent. Grounded in the agency theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between federal compliance requirement, executive compensation, nonprofit size, nonprofit type, and internal control infraction. Archival data were collected from 144 nonprofit organizations in the southeast United States. The results of the multiple regression analyses indicated the model was able to predict the relationship between federal compliance requirement, executive compensation, nonprofit size, nonprofit type, and internal control infraction, F(7, 136) = 6.559, p < .001, R2 = .252, with non-profit type (hospitals), (β = -9.392, t = 7.191, p <0.050), accounting for a higher contribution to the model than executive compensation, (β = -0.049, t = 1.96, p <0.050). Federal compliance requirement and nonprofit size did not explain any significant variation in internal control infraction. The implications for positive social change included the potential for a better understanding by nonprofit managers of the importance of internal controls, leading to the effective and efficient provision of goods and services needed by members of society.

Ceo Long-Term Incentive Pay In Mergers And Acquisitions, Randy Beavers

SPU Works

This paper analyzes the CEO incentives of inside debt in the form of deferred equity compensation in the context of M&A decisions. This study runs statistical regressions on the likelihood of a merger, whether the deal is diversifying, how much stock is used to pay for the deal, and the relative deal size controlling for CEO long-term incentive pay as the main variable of interest and including controls for firm characteristics, merger characteristics, industry, and year. This paper sheds light on LTIP effects before compensation changes occur after an M&A event. This study uses archival data from 1996 to 2005 …

Executive Compensation, Corporate Tax Aggressiveness And Financial Reporting Aggressiveness: Evidence From Sfas 123r, Bonnie R. Quillin

Accounting Dissertations

Using a variety of research methods, prior empirical research finds that executive compensation influences the behavior of managers, particularly with decisions involving risk. These studies show that, when executive compensation is more sensitive to stock price volatility, firms implement riskier investment and financial policies and take more aggressive positions in financial and tax reporting. The sensitivity of executive compensation to stock price volatility is largely due to stock option compensation. Prior studies provide evidence that companies reduced the stock option grants to executives following the introduction of the Statement of Financial Accounting Standard 123R – Share-Based Payment (SFAS 123R). The …

Pay For Performance: What Type Of Pay Scheme Is Best For Achieving Business Results?, Fermin Augusto Diez

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Much has been written, for and against, about compensation as a driver of performance. Two main theoretical constructs deal with this subject: extrinsic theory, including agency theory, whereby money is a main motivator to performance, and intrinsic theory which proposes that money does not motivate, and in fact may hinder, performance. However, corporations spend considerable effort in designing compensation packages with the objective of linking remuneration to performance. Practitioners have developed a variety of mechanisms to deliver pay packages, but heretofore there has been no attempt to validate which, if any, of these various approaches is better able to drive …

Competitive Repertoire Complexity: Governance Antecedents And Performance Outcomes, Brian L. Connelly, Laszlo Tihanyi, David J. Ketchen Jr., Christina Matz Carnes, Walter J. Ferrier

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Research summary: Past inquiry has found that implementing complex competitive repertoires (i.e., diverse and dynamic arrays of actions) is challenging, but firms benefit from doing so. Our examination of the antecedents and outcomes of complex competitive repertoires develops a more nuanced perspective. Data from 1,168 firms in 204 industries reveal that complexity initially harms performance, but then becomes a positive factor, except at high levels. We use agency and tournament theories, respectively, to examine how key governance mechanisms—ownership structure and executive compensation—help shape firms’ competitive repertoires. We find that the principals of agency theory and the pay gap of tournament …

The Two Sides Of Ceo Pay Injustice: A Power Law Conceptualization Of Ceo Over And Underpayment, Herman Aguinis, Geoffrey P. Martin Dr, Luis R. Gomez-Mejia Dr, Ernest H. O'Boyle, Harry Joo

Geoffrey P Martin

Association Of Nonfinancial Performance Measures With The Financial Performance Of A Lodging Chain, Rajiv D. Banker, Gordon S. Potter, Dhinu Srinivasan

Gordon Potter

A test of nonfinancial measures used as part of a management-incentive program by a U.S.-based, full-service hotel chain found that improvements in the nonfinancial measures were followed shortly by increases in revenue and profit. The two nonfinancial measures are customer satisfaction as measured by guests’ comment card indications of likelihood to return and level of complaints. The lag between the nonfinancial measures and changes in revenue and operating profit was six months in this case. While the test applies directly to that one chain, the lesson is important to the rest of the hotel industry.

The Changing Chief Human Resources Officer Role: Results Of The 2016 Hr@Moore Survey Of Chief Hr Officers, Patrick M. Wright, Anthony J. Nyberg, Donald J. Schepker, Ormonde Cragun, Michael D. Ulrich

Reports

The 2016 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers continued the tradition of exploring different aspects of the CHRO role to identify trends while also delving deeper into some new and less explored issues. This year’s results finds little change regarding how CHROs allocate their time to various roles. They continue to spend the most time as the Leader of the HR Function, followed by Talent Architect and Strategic Advisor, and Counselor/Confidant/Coach. Delving into the question of what they counsel their CEOs about, we found that the most popular topics concern executive team talent and its effectiveness, followed by business issues, …

How Relevant Is The Disclosure Of A Ceo Pay Ratio?, Addison Stanfill

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

An aftershock of the so called “Great Recession” in 2008, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act effective July 21, 2010 aimed to increase the transparency of public companies. Section 953(b) of this act is targeting the transparency of executive and employee compensation by requiring the disclosure of a CEO to median employee pay ratio. This disclosure requirement, set to affect all filings with a fiscal year beginning after January 1, 2017, was a response to the public outcry against excessive CEO compensation. Although it does promote the transparency initiative of the Dodd-Frank Act, this disclosure may be …

A State-Stewardship View On Executive Compensation, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog, Sunny Li Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We take a state-stewardship view on corporate governance and executive compensation in economies with strong political involvement, where state-appointed managers act as responsible ‘stewards’ rather than ‘agents’ of the state. We test this view on China and find that Chinese managers are remunerated not for maximizing equity value but for increasing the value of state-owned assets. Managerial compensation depends on political connections and prestige, and on the firms’ contribution to political goals. These effects were attenuated since the market-oriented governance reform. In a social welfare perspective, such compensation stimulates not the maximization of shareholder value but the preservation of the …

Executive Compensation In Controlled Companies, Kobi Kastiel

Indiana Law Journal

Conventional wisdom among corporate law theorists holds that the presence of a controlling shareholder should alleviate the problem of managerial opportunism because such a controller has both the power and incentives to curb excessive executive pay. This Article challenges that common understanding by proposing a different view based on an agency problem paradigm. Controlling shareholders, this Article suggests, may in fact overpay managers in order to maximize controllers’ consumption of private benefits, due to their close social and business ties with professional managers or for other reasons, such as being captured by professional managers. This tendency to overpay managers is …

Two Essays On The Effects Of External Pressure On Executive Compensation: Evidenced Through Political Sensitivity And Pay For Performance Disclosure, Brandy Elaine Hadley

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the impact of two external forces on executive compensation behavior. In the first chapter, the impact of political sensitivity is investigated as an external force on government contractor executive compensation. Compensation for top executives has come into the political spotlight, especially over the last decade, with many politicians publicly supporting limits on compensation. However, the impact of political scrutiny to limit compensation is debatable. This study analyzes the effect of political scrutiny on CEO compensation using a sample of Federal contractors, which represents a group of firms where politicians yield the most power. Results suggest that Federal …