Accounting and economic consequences of CEO paycuts

Boards sometimes cut a CEO’s pay following poor performance. This study examines whether such CEO paycuts really work. We identify 1,496 instances of large CEO paycuts during the period 1994–2013. We then create a propensity-score-matched control group of firms that did not cut their CEOs’ pay and employ a difference-in-differences approach to examine the consequences of paycuts. Our results show that, following a paycut, CEOs are likely to engage in earnings management in an attempt to accelerate improvement in the reported performance and to achieve a speedier restoration of their pay to pre-cut levels. Further, we find that improvement in long-term performance after a paycut occurs only for those firms with lower levels of earnings management after the paycut. Finally, we show that paycuts are more likely to lead to unintended value-destroying consequences in the absence of high institutional ownership or when the CEO is sufficiently entrenched, thereby impairing the effectiveness of internal monitoring by boards.     

Does social responsibility begin at home? The relation between firms’ pension policies and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities

Review of Accounting Studies - Pension freezes are highly visible corporate actions with the potential to hurt the firms’ reputation as “responsible” employers. We document that...     

Institutional ownership and the informativeness of disclosure tone

Disclosure tone is an important qualitative characteristic of managerial disclosures. There is mixed evidence on the role of tone in disclosure strategy. While some studies highlight the informativeness of disclosure tone, other studies provide evidence consistent with an information obfuscation role. We conjecture that the mixed evidence may be because prior studies have not explicitly modeled the role of oversight over managerial disclosure. Using an exogenous shock to institutional ownership, an important source of managerial oversight, we find that abnormal disclosure tone is informative of a firm's future earnings and cash flows when institutional ownership is high. This positive association between institutional ownership and informativeness of abnormal tone is stronger when there is an increase in quasi-indexer institutional ownership and the contemporaneous performance is negative. Collectively, the results highlight a more complex role for disclosure tone. Abnormal disclosure tone could be reflective of managerial sentiment and convey forward-looking information to investors in the presence of greater oversight over managerial actions.