股权激励、契约异质性与实体企业金融化

从股权激励视角切入,利用2008—2019年沪深A股上市公司的经验数据,探究股权激励对企业金融化的影响。研究发现：从整体上看,股权激励会抑制企业金融化。基于微观契约层面,股权激励强度越大,股权激励对企业金融化的抑制程度越大;相较于限制性股票,股票期权对企业金融化的抑制程度更大;只有激励期限较长的股权激励才会抑制企业金融化。作用机制检验表明,股权激励会降低股东与管理层之间的代理成本、缓解融资约束进而抑制企业金融化。研究结论有助于充实和深化股权激励与企业金融化关系研究,也为从公司内部治理层面防范和化解实体经济风险提供证据支持。     

股权激励方式对审计需求影响的实证研究

分析股票期权和限制性股票两种股权激励方式对于审计需求的影响,并采用上市公司数据检验相关结论,结果表明:在股票市场行情不被看好时,由于被激励人对期权价值的悲观预期,股票期权的治理作用较弱,与审计需求负相关;同时,与股票期权相比,限制性股票有着更好的公司治理作用和较高的审计需求。上市公司治理层在选择股权激励时候,应当注意激励方式的选择,考虑股市行情带来的期权价值预期对股权激励效果的影响。     

公司风险视角下上市国企管理层股权激励研究

在允许国有控股上市公司实施股权激励的背景下,考察了其不同种类风险与经营者股权激励强度的关系。先界定了风险的类型,再通过构建基于风险的两种股权激励模型,并进一步推导得出：若国有上市企业的管理层不能（可以）买卖公司以外的市场证券组合时,其最优股权激励强度与公司特别性风险成反向变化关系,而与公司整体性风险的相关关系不确定（无关）,这为正在实践中摸索的国有上市企业管理层股权激励合同的设计提供了进一步的理论建议。     

股权激励如何驱动企业研发支出？——基于股权激励异质性的视角

股权激励被视为解决研发支出中代理冲突的重要工具,但现有经验证据并不稳定甚至相互矛盾。基于股权激励异质性的视角,本文引入新的股权激励特征——股权激励价值的股价及股价波动率敏感性,考察股权激励对企业研发支出的驱动机制,并利用2006-2012年我国实施股权激励的上市公司作为样本进行检验。研究发现:股权激励对企业研发支出的驱动机制包含风险规避效应与激励效应两个相反维度,最终驱动方向与强度取决于两类效应的博弈;限制性股票的风险规避效应显著强于股票期权;股票期权的激励效应显著强于限制性股票;市场竞争程度、企业产权性质与授予动机对限制性股票与股票期权的两类效应产生调节作用。     

Supplier incentives and resource constraints under uncertainty

Procurement in environments of cost uncertainty and asymmetric information require special arrangements such as the linear incentive contract. Usually the buyer is motivated to make investments that can relieve temporary supplier resource constraints during the procurement. Special problems arise, however, due to interactions between investments in suppliers and the risk-incentive trade-off achieved by the incentive contract. A cost signaling model is proposed to overcome these problems, where a supplier offers an equity share in the profit from the incentive contract to the buyer in return for a priori investment. The equity share signals the supplier's private cost information, and forms the basis for the buyer's investment decision. Under equilibrium the buyer can expect to recover the entire amount provided to the supplier through his or her share of the profit.     

Incorporating a “no claim bonus” in insurance agency contract

A bonus received by an agent from an insurer when the insured does not make a claim is called a “no claim bonus” (NCB). An NCB rewards the agent's risk‐management (RM) effort that reduces the probability that the insured suffers a loss. This paper designs an incentive compatible contract that induces the agent to choose an RM effort. If the agent's RM effort cost is lower than a threshold, feasible ranges of NCB and premium values exist such that the insurer can offer an incentive compatible agency contract with an NCB that is acceptable to the agent.     

Earnings fraud: board control vs CEO control and corporate performance – 1992–2004

The turn of the millennium is associated with increased corporate fraud, largely attributed to the failure of corporate governance. The compensation committee is expected to minimize fraud by rewarding only appropriate CEO behavior. A causal modeling approach, the Directed Acyclic Graph, was used to estimate the structure of corporate fraud. Corporate fraud was measured as illegal earnings statement(s), not all restatements but only those found illegal. A major finding is that the CEO's stock‐option compensation motivates the CEO to commit corporate earnings fraud, while cash salaries and bonuses are only indirectly related to earnings fraud through those stock options. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding how heterogeneous agents affect Principal's returns: Perspectives from short-termism and Bayesian learning

We consider a general framework of optimal contract design under the heterogeneity and short-termism of agents. Our research shows that the optimal contract must weigh the agent's information rent, incentive cost, and benefit to overcome the contract's adverse selection and moral hazards. Agents with higher moral levels were more likely to choose higher effort and lower manipulation. Simultaneously, the principal offers lower incentives and receives more significant payoff. We also extend our model to investigate the benefits of Bayesian learning. Furthermore, we compare the principal's returns in general and learning models and find that the learning contract can bring more profit to the principal.     

Financial reporting fraud and CEO pay-performance incentives

Because prior studies find mixed results on the relation between CEOs’ pay performance incentives and a firm’s likelihood of financial reporting fraud, we restudy their relationship using innovative research methods. First, we concentrate on incentives from granting options rather than equity-based incentives. Second, we emphasize vested options, disregarding unvested option holdings, and take the logarithm transformation of option incentives. Third, we analyse the impact of option incentives on future financial reporting irregularities. Using this innovative approach as well as a full sample and a matched sample, we find that an increase in executives’ option incentives raises the likelihood of financial reporting violations. Moreover, the effect of option incentives on financial reporting fraud is moderated by auditor effort. In addition, we find that another proxy for the measurement of executives’ option incentives, namely, the number of vested options by executives, is highly correlated with the CEO’s vested stock option sensitivity.     

The revision frequency of earnings forecasts and firm characteristics

This study investigates how the revision frequency of earnings forecasts affects firm characteristics. Previous studies generally focus on the number of analysts following a firm to measure a firm's information environment. The frequency with which news is updated is often defined as an analyst's effort. Analysts provide more information to investors if they update news more frequently. This study examines whether the frequency of information updating for a particular firm affects the firm's performance. We apply three proxies for firm performance: stock liquidity, the cost of equity capital, and firm value. Our findings indicate that the analysts’ effort as measured by the frequency of news updating is effective in providing additional power beyond the number of analysts to represent the information environment of a firm. Therefore, this study suggests that combining both the number of analysts following a firm and the frequency of news updating can be a better proxy for assessing a firm's information environment.     

Optimal financial contracts with hidden effort,unobservable profits and endogenous costs of effort

This paper studies financial contracting in a two-period financing model with double moral hazard, as entrepreneurial effort choices and profits are unobservable and non-verifiable. The optimal financial contract must induce both the high effort level and truthful revelation of profits. The paper further analyses the structure of the optimal contract where the entrepreneur's payoff takes a general functional form that allows for endogenously determined costs of effort. The entrepreneur's performance is influenced by not only extrinsic work motivation factors but also intrinsic factors so that the degree of control imposed by the investor, in the form of end-of-period transfers, affects the entrepreneur's costs of effort. The finding shows that under well-defined conditions, the optimal contract that solves a model with non-verifiable profits also elicits effort, and generally resembles a simple debt contract. The structure of the optimal contract is robust in the general case where the entrepreneur's payoff function is non-linear in transfers.     

Debt finance and the cost of management ownership: Some elementary results

Increased debt reduces a company's equity base, which reduces the dollar investment a manager must make to hold a given proportion of stock. Therefore, it is often argued, managers' effort incentives are improved by high leverage. This paper shows that while risky debt reduces the cost of providing managers with substantial equity ownership, the cheaper equity captures less of the fruits of the manager's effort. Managers' effort incentives are improved by high debt levels only under quite restrictive conditions. These conditions are more plausible when agency problems are due to a managerial propensity to expand size by investing in negative net present value projects. The results also imply that when debt is increased to reduce the agency costs of free cash flow, the accompanying covenants should allow for substantial cash distributions to shareholders even before bondholder claims are satisfied.     

上市公司股权激励模式的选择偏好及动态演化——来自中国上市公司的经验证据

股票期权与限制性股票是股权分置改革后中国上市公司最常用的两种股权激励模式,这两种股权激励模式在激励作用、操作方式、基本规范等方面具有显著差异.通过对2006年至2009年首次公告股权激励方案的中国上市公司进行实证检验后发现,上市公司对股权激励模式的选择具有显著偏好,而且这种偏好经历了从非理性到理性的动态演化:2006年至2007年,国有控股上市公司以获利空间为导向而偏好于限制性股票,即终极控制人性质是影响股权激励模式选择的主导因素;2008年至2009年,影响股权激励选择的主导因素演变成为公司的成长性,即高成长性企业更倾向于选择股票期权模式.     

Peer Evaluation: Incentives and Coworker Relations

In many workplaces, coworkers have the best information about each other's efforts. This paper studies a principal who only observes the joint output by two limitedly liable agents, while agents receive signals about each other's effort levels. The principal attempts to exploit this information through peer evaluation; agents are asked to report their signal and may receive a bonus for being evaluated positively. Lying aversion ascertains that truthful evaluation is possible, while interpersonal relations between colleagues give an incentive to misreport. This paper shows that peer evaluation gives an incentive for effort, even when the evaluations are not truthful. The peer evaluation bonus is constrained by more intensive coworker relations. Still, the optimal contract always includes a peer evaluation bonus, sometimes complemented with a team bonus. Coworker relations have nonmonotonic effects on profits in the optimal contract.     

Fake news

This analysis uses Twitter stock and options prices sampled at a 30 s frequency around the fake news announcement, of a bid for a controlling stake in Twitter stock, to investigate how noise trading and informed trading is disseminated into equity and option markets. We find reaction to the fake news occurred in the equity market, and the option market reacted with a delay. This differs from many analyses of actual news events, which found informed traders prefer the options market, and information from their trades then leaks into the equity market. We conclude uninformed traders, and those aware of the hoax, prefer to trade in equity over option markets. This result has implications for isolating informed trading around actual news events.     

Information Acquisition and the Equilibrium Incentive Problem

I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal–agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. I emphasize that adverse selection or moral hazard is the principal's endogenous choice by inducing or deterring information acquisition. The principal designs the contract not only to address an existing incentive problem but also to implement its presence. Implementation of adverse selection relies on a steeper information rent to the agent than the standard menu, such that the agent is motivated to distinguish the efficient state of nature from the inefficient. Moral hazard is implemented by replacing the benchmark debt contract with a debt‐with‐equity‐share contract, such that the agent does not attempt to acquire information to either avoid debt or to extract rent.     

Optimal Loyalty‐Based Management

We study an agency model in which an entrepreneur selects a manager from a candidate set. The selected manager's effort improves the project's potential environment, and is a hidden action. The realized project environment is the entrepreneur's private information. A manager's utility has two components—(i) loyalty, with which the manager values the organization's profit, and (ii) selfishness, with which the manager values the monetary transfer he receives from the entrepreneur. We find that if the manager's task is easy enough, it is optimal to use a purely loyal manager. Otherwise, it can be optimal to use a manager with mixture of loyalty and selfishness—the manager's mixed motivation alleviates the entrepreneur's misrepresenting incentive, and as a result, the output distortion in the optimal contract can be reduced. In addition, when it is optimal to use a manager with mixed motivations, the entrepreneur selects someone who is more selfish than loyal.     

Behavioral agency and corporate entrepreneurship: CEO equity incentives & competitive behavior

Scholars have long studied drivers of entrepreneurial behavior among established firms. Yet little is known about how individual factors shape a firm’s choice to pursue entrepreneurship. We draw on behavioral agency theory to explore the role of equity incentives in driving corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest CEOs avoid corporate entrepreneurial behaviors as their option wealth increases. However industry dynamics also prove to be an important contingency when predicting the effects of both restricted stock and stock options on the likelihood that the CEO engages in corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings provide a theoretical platform for predicting dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior and highlight effects of CEO equity ownership.

     

Litigation costs and the underpricing of initial public offerings

This paper examines a risk-averse entrepreneur's motivation to underprice an initial public offering of equity where the entrepreneur faces the threat of litigation by outside investors. Outside investors have an incentive to seek compensation via tort law and the Securities Act of 1933 should the stock price fall subsequent to their purchase of the IPO. Potential litigation costs motivate the entrepreneur to underprice the IPO in a tradeoff between the litigation cost and the up-front opportunity loss of underpricing. In a single-period model, this paper formalizes the entrepreneur's pricing and retained ownership decisions resulting in ten testable hypotheses.     

陕西省上市公司股权激励影响因素研究

目前,许多上市公司在进行股权激励时总遇到外部环境、内在因素和实际操作中的一些障碍,研究上市公司股权激励的影响因素将有助于解决这些问题,提高公司的治理效率,提升公司业绩。这里介绍陕西省上市公司股权激励实施的现状后,对股权激励实施的影响因素进行实证分析,探究影响上市公司股权激励实施的实质,以期提高公司经营管理的效率,为股权激励制度在我国的广泛应用提供一些有效建议。