MEASURING MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE OF DAIRY FARMERS

Increased emphasis has centered on methods to measure and predict managerial performance of farmers. In doing this, one of the foremost problems is the development of a reliable and valid criterion variable, because of a number of characteristics of farming and the farm-family complex.
This article discusses problems in developing a criterion of management performance and examines the use of rating techniques for this purpose. Two rating techniques are used to measure management performance on Missouri dairy farms. The results, while suggesting major differences both in the criterion of managerial performance used by different people and in the ratings, identify sources of the differences and opportunities to improve the measuring of management performance.     

Legal Investor Protection and Takeovers

This paper examines the role of legal investor protection for the efficiency of the market for corporate control when bidders are financially constrained. In the model, stronger legal investor protection increases bidders' outside funding capacity. However, absent effective bidding competition, this does not improve efficiency, as the bid price, and thus bidders' need for funds, increases one‐for‐one with the pledgeable income. In contrast, under effective competition for the target, the increased outside funding capacity improves efficiency by making it less likely that more efficient but less wealthy bidders are outbid by less efficient but wealthier rivals.     

Financial Contracting and the Choice between Private Placement and Publicly Offered Bonds

The financial contracting in private placement bonds and publicly offered bonds are different. Our data show that private placement bonds are more likely to have restrictive covenants than public bonds. Private placement bonds are also more likely to be issued by smaller and riskier firms. For investment‐grade firms that issue bonds in both markets, our analysis shows that firms select the bond type to minimize financing costs. We find significant differences in the pricing of private placement and publicly offered bonds, and some of these differences appear to be related to the different institutional features between the two markets.     

Work Ethic, Employment Contracts, and Firm Value

We analyze how the work ethic of managers impacts a firm's employment contracts, riskiness, growth potential, and organizational structure. Flat contracts are optimal for diligent managers because they reduce risk-sharing costs, but they attract egoistic agents who shirk and unskilled agents who add no value. Stable, bureaucratic firms with low growth potential are more likely to gain value from managerial diligence. Firms that hire from a virtuous pool of agents are more conservative in their investments and have a horizontal corporate structure. Our theory also yields several testable implications that distinguish it from standard agency models.     

Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations

By carefully matching the data sets from the Michigan Survey of Consumers with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the propensity of U.S. households to learn from experts in forming inflation expectations. Additional results for a group of European economies broadly confirm this observation. We advance an extended version of the sticky-information model to analyze disagreement in consumer inflation expectations. Besides differences in consumers' propensities to learn, disagreement in our model arises from heterogeneity in consumers' fundamental inflation and past expectations and experts' different views about future inflation.     

Dynamic Contracting with Intermediation: Operational,Governance, and Financial Engineering

Private equity funds intermediate investment and affect portfolio firm performance by actively engaging in operational, governance, and financial engineering. We study this type of intermediation in a dynamic agency model in which an active intermediary raises funds from outside investors and invests in a firm run by an agent. Optimal contracting addresses moral hazard at the intermediary and firm levels. The intermediary's incentives to affect firm performance are strongest after poor performance, while the agent's incentives are strongest after good performance. We also show how financial engineering, that is, financial contracting with outside investors, interacts with operational and governance engineering.