Asset sales and takeover threats

This research addresses the question of whether the existence of a recent takeover threat affects the market reaction to a subsequent sale of assets. The effect of a prior takeover threat on the stock price reaction to an asset sale is examined from the perspective of both the buying firm and the selling firm. The total gains to the transaction are estimated as a market weighted average of the abnormal returns to the two firms. The results show that when there has not been a recent takeover threat on the selling firm, abnormal returns are significantly positive for the seller, the buyer and in total. However, if the selling firm has faced a takeover threat within the previous year, the abnormal returns upon announcement of an asset sale are insignificant for the seller, negative for the buyer, and negative for a portfolio of the two. Hence, the market has a lower estimate of the overall gains in transactions that follow takeover threats on the selling firm; in fact, these transactions result in a net wealth reduction.     

INFORMATION EXTERNALITIES, SHARE-PRICE BASED INCENTIVES AND MANAGERIAL BEHAVIOUR

Abstract. We survey recent theoretical research on the effects of short-term share-price based managerial incentive schemes. Such schemes can induce inefficient managerial behaviour in both hidden action and hidden type contexts. These problems arise from informational asymmetries: managers take actions to manipulate the information flow rather than to maximize firm value. More generally, imperfect transmission of information between managers and shareholders or between managers of different firms can lead to similar distortions even when the parties' interests are aligned.     

When do high‐level managers believe they can influence the stock price? Antecedents of stock price expectancy cognitions

Stock based rewards are often used to motivate high‐level managers to take actions to increase the stock price of the firm. However, numerous constraints may weaken the perceived link between individual effort and stock price appreciation for many recipients. This study introduces a new construct, stock price expectancy, which we define as individuals' perceptions of influence over their firm's stock price. We examined its antecedents in a sample of 349 high‐level U.S. managers and found that employment at corporate headquarters, firm size, hierarchical level, and contact with investment analysts predicted stock price expectancy perceptions. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Learning in Advance Selling with Heterogeneous Consumers

Advance selling occurs when consumers order a firm's product prior to the regular selling season. It reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyers and enables the firm to better forecast its future demand. The distinctive feature of this paper is that there are both experienced and inexperienced consumers, with the former knowing their valuations of the product in advance. We show that pre‐orders from experienced consumers lead to a more precise forecast of future demand by the firm and that the optimal pre‐order price may be at a discount or a premium relative to the regular selling price. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CEO compensation structure following succession: Evidence of optimal incentives with career concerns

To motivate managers to pursue shareholder interests, boards may design management compensation packages to reward managers for good firm performance. However, Gibbons and Murphy (1992) note that when CEOs are far from retirement, they have career concerns. In these cases, Gibbons and Murphy argue that it may not be optimal for their current compensation to be too dependent on firm performance. Testing this proposition, we find that abnormal returns are negatively related to the percentage of performance-based pay of newly hired CEOs when companies announce CEO successions. Since these newly hired CEOs are likely some distance from retirement, we interpret these results as being consistent with Gibbons and Murphy; it may be better to allow newly hired CEOs to be paid in human capital increases from the managerial labor market than to have their current pay too closely related to performance.     

Firm-specific wage growth and changes in the labor market for managers

This paper analyzes recent changes in the employment relationships between managers and firms. In both Becker's and Lazear's models of firm-specific wage growth, compensation is deferred from early in an employee's tenure with a firm until later in the contract. The deferred compensation bonds the worker to the firm. Based on cross-sectional data from Current Population Surveys, rates of firm-specific wage growth are estimated for the managerial labor market. The findings show that the rate of wage growth that is firm-specific for managers in manufacturing industries declined significantly during the early 1980s. It is estimated, for example, that a manager with 12 years of tenure in a manufacturing firm enjoyed, on average, a 25% wage premium in 1979 over an otherwise similar manager who was a new hire in a firm. By 1983 the firm-specific wage premium for a manager with 12 years of tenure was only 5%. These changes represent a significant reduction in the strength of the employment bond between firms and managers, and a reduction in the incentive effects previously enjoyed by firms from the use of deferred-compensation schemes. This change is consistent with the significant increases in the displacement rates of managers that occurred during the 1980s.     

Modeling the unintended consequences of short selling for innovation investment

We develop an innovation investment decision model for firms facing a short selling threat. We find that an endogenous agency problem may arise as an unintended consequence of short selling under the prevailing compensation structure. Specifically, the manager has strong incentives to seek better compensation at the expense of decreasing firm value by reducing long-term innovation investment to save cash reserves to protect the short-term price because the manager’s compensation is closely tied to this value. Finally, our model predicts that both the lending supply and short selling will induce the manager to underinvest and have a negative effect on firm value and the manager’s private benefit because they exacerbate agency conflicts.     

Unconventional monetary policy and the stock market’s reaction to Federal Reserve policy actions

We examine the change in the effect of Federal Reserve’s policy actions on stock returns after the Fed started to use unconventional policy actions. We find that the response of stock returns to monetary policy actions are almost seven times higher after the federal funds rate hit the zero lower bound. We conduct additional analysis to examine the underlying causes of the increase in the impact of monetary policy actions of stock returns. We show that investors rebalance their portfolios towards equity after selling Treasury securities to the Federal Reserve during large scale asset purchases.     

Expect the unexpected: examining the shaping role of entrepreneurial orientation on causal and effectual decision-making logic during economic crisis

ABSTRACT

While many firms operate in dynamic environments, the competitive conditions faced by firms during an economic crisis are especially unstable and turbulent. We examine firm strategic decision-making in this distinctive context and investigate the question of whether causal and effectual logic provide similar paths to performance during such challenging economic times. Further, we examine the potential impact that a firm’s level of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has upon the relationship between managers’ predominant decision-making logic and their firm’s overall performance in this crisis. To test these relationships, we employ a robust national random sample of 447 Russian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) collected from 2015 to 2016 during a period of economic crisis. Our results indicate that EO plays an important moderating role, shaping the nature of the relationships between managers’ decision-making logic and financial performance. Moreover, additional analysis identifies the presence of a non-linear relationship between both logics and the performance of SMEs.     

The firm,the platform and the customer: A “double mangle” interpretation of social media for innovation

The aim of this article was to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry, and created to keep in contact with its customers, while gathering innovative ideas from them.In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical approach that is deeply rooted in Pickering's “mangle” theory, and Jones' subsequent metaphor of “double dance of agency” i.e. human and material agencies. A longitudinal case study has been developed with two rounds of interviews with marketing and R&D managers. A total of 8 recorded interviews, for 22 h overall.We examined conditions in the ongoing functioning of the platform, and considered how the website's dynamic materiality configures and reconfigures the practices and possibilities of different modes of engagement by multiple users (i.e. firm employees and customers) and vice versa. Specifically, dealing with the case of a social media platform developed by a firm to gain clearly defined organizational ends, the entanglement is considered to be double. One entanglement is between the human agency of customers and the material agency of the social media platform. The other is between the human agency of the firm and the material agency of the social media platform, including all actions that human agents (i.e. firm employees) undertake in seeking to channel material agency and shape actions of other human agents, i.e. customers.     

Productivity measurement for a distribution firm

The paper derives a consistent accounting framework for the treatment of inventories when measuring the productivity of a distribution firm. The average purchase price of an inventory item during an accounting period must be distinguished from its average selling price and these two average prices should be distinguished from the corresponding balance sheet prices. The accounting framework is implemented for a distribution firm which sold 76,000 separate items. The firm achieved a 9.6 percent per quarter total factor productivity growth rate over 6 quarters.The first author is a Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia and a research associate of the NBER. He thanks the SSHRC of Canada for research support. The second author is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia.     

Compensation-based stock trading by corporate executive and aggregate management ownership of the firm: Some additional evidence

Managers place a low value on equity-based compensation because it exposes them to the risk of the firm. Such undervaluation and the need to achieve diversification may force a manager to sell his own stock of the firm in response to equity-based awards. In this paper we examine whether such stock selling by an executive depends on the aggregate level of management ownership of the firm. We argue that stock selling occurs at a high level of aggregate ownership where an executive has a low probability of being replaced. Our findings support this “management ownership” argument of compensation-based stock trading. One implication is that the board's effort to minimize agency conflicts becomes less effective once aggregate ownership increases to a certain threshold level. (JEL G30, G32) This research was carried out with the support of the Western New England College research fund.     

Information Technology and the Organization of Firms

This paper seeks to understand why improved information technology (IT) might strengthen the case for decentralization, as recent empirical work suggests. We study a firm with a headquarters and two managers, each of whom gathers information about her changing local environment. The firm earns a gross profit that depends on actions taken as well as the current local environments. More information permits better actions, and information‐gathering costs drop as IT improves. When the firm is centralized, information‐gathering expenditures are first best, but after the firm decentralizes, each manager becomes a self‐interested player of a “sharing game” in which she collects a share of gross profit and bears the cost of her chosen information‐gathering activities. The firm's actions are determined by the information gathered at the equilibria of the game. As a result, the firm experiences a decentralization penalty, namely the change in net profit (gross profit minus informational costs) after decentralizing. If the penalty is small, then it is outweighed by the advantages of decentralizing—the vanishing of monitoring costs and perhaps the improved motivation of a decentralized manager's staff. To gather information a manager chooses (once and for all) a partitioning of her possible local environments and then searches to find the set in which her current environment lies. Our main measure of a manager's information cost is a technology parameter, θ, times the number of sets in her chosen partitioning. A second measure is θ times the partitioning's “Shannon content,” which may be interpreted as average search time when search is efficient. We ask whether improved IT, i.e., a drop in θ, indeed lowers the decentralization penalty. We obtain a strongly affirmative answer to this question for both cost measures in a class of examples and a mixed answer when we generalize so as to preserve some of the key properties of those examples. In a parallel manner we explore another conjecture suggested in the empirical literature, namely that better IT raises the coordination benefit, which we define as the increase in net profit when the firm bases its actions on pooled information, rather than letting each action variable depend on the information gathered by just one manager.     

Cross-ownership as a hostage exchange to support collaboration

The impossibility of writing complete contracts causes loss of profitable transactions among firms, since their managers cannot ex ante bind themselves to future actions. We show how a reallocation of ownership rights into a network of mutual shareholdings among a coalition of firms produces an efficient enforcement mechanism. Co-operation is achieved by exchanging control rights until a mutual threat of capture of control is established. By making control over their firms vulnerable to a takeover by the other members of the coalition, each firm is able to make a credible commitment to future efficient actions. In equilibrium no punishment is administered, so that the arrangement achieves the outcome under complete contracts. More generally, it is proved that a mutual hostage exchange may dominate the threat of loss of reputation as an enforcement mechanism.     

Optimal advertising for selling a product with a nondifferentiable demand function

We consider a firm which seeks the maximum profit by selling a product and assume that the firm can advertise its product in order to improve the firm goodwill and affect the product demand positively. In particular the good demand is zero when the goodwill is less than a fixed threshold. The problem is formulated in terms of optimal control theory. We show that there exists a unique optimal solution and sketch an algorithm to determine it.     

Changing legitimate discourse: a case study

This study is concerned with the explanations that managers give to various company stakeholders, in the case of factory closures for example. More generally, the paper examines the way justifications of managerial action are produced and “consumed”, and how the “legitimacy” on which they are based can change over time. With the help of a longitudinal case study the paper describes and seeks to explain the legitimisation processes involved in the major organisational transformations that the case firm has had to face due to radical market changes (joining EU) and organisational changes. It is argued that managers may become prisoners of their context. This may mean that even if they made “correct” decisions, they may still justify these actions “incorrectly” relative to the new cultural and market environment, and thus do not acquire legitimacy. In the reported case almost the whole executive board of the firm was fired—the first time such a thing had happened in the history of Finnish corporate life. It is also shown that the justification of managerial action may be deliberately manipulated in public discourse. One powerful legitimative device in such discourse is to invoke financial distress, or the idea of such distress, which may be needed for triggering genuine changes.     

企业控制权视角下的公司治理与内部审计

公司治理是企业内部投资者和管理者之间一系列调解利害关系的契约,内部审计即产生于此。内部审计满足了投资者对公司治理和管理者对经营控制的需求。本文从企业产权理论的角度对公司治理和内部审计的关系及内部审计在公司治理中的作用进行了研究。     

Short‐Term Expectations in Listed Firms: The Effects Of Different Owner Types

We report empirical evidence in line with the disciplining role of different institutional and other owner types in reducing managerial myopia. Using data from a large Nordic survey, we find that companies, to a reasonably high degree, feel that external pressure for a good result in the short‐term generates conflict with the company's long‐term goals. We test for the effect of different ownership types and find that especially in firms with a large and non‐transitory activist or fund as an owner, the perceived pressure for short‐term actions is reduced. In addition, we observe a negative association between firm profitability and short‐term pressure, and we find that younger managers feel significantly more pressure. Firms subject to greater pressure engage in more actions to accommodate that pressure. Again, the impact of a large activist owner is especially beneficial because such firms significantly less often undertake actions that have the potential to destroy value, such as deprioritizing their long‐term investments or R&D.     

Durable-Goods Monopoly with Endogenous Innovation

While selling an existing product, a durable-goods monopolist may develop a new, improved product. The firm must consider the interaction between its intertemporal pricing and research and development (R&D) decisions. The interactions show a sharp dichotomy depending on pricing regimes. When it is optimal for the firm to continue to sell the old model along with the new model, the interactions disappear. However, when it is optimal for the firm to discontinue the sale of the old model after introducing the new model, the firm will face a time-inconsistency problem in its R&D decision .