Stock options and managerial optimal contracts

Summary. In this paper we are concerned with the performance of stock option contracts in the provision of managerial incentives. In our simple framework, we restrict the space of contracts available to the principal to those conformed by a fixed payment and a call option on the firms stock. As compared to the fixed payment and the option grant, we find that the strike price plays an intermediate role in the provision of insurance and incentives. We also develop some methods for the calibration of a standard principal-agent model based upon observed CEO earnings schedules and the volatility of the firms value in the stock market. These methods are useful to address some important issues such as the performance of stock option contracts, the degree of risk aversion compatible with current earnings profiles and the sensitivity of compensation to changes in firms characteristics.Received: 9 April 2003, Revised: 13 September 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C6, D83. Correspondence to: Manuel S. SantosWe have benefitted from helpful discussions with Marco Celentani, Hector Chade, Alejandro Manelli and Ed Schlee. We are especially grateful to an anonymous referee for very detailed comments.     

Measurement distortion and missing contingencies in optimal contracts

Summary Theory suggests that optimal contracts should include many contingencies to achieve optimal risk sharing. However, in practice, few contracts are as complex as theory suggests. This paper develops a model which is consistent with this observation. The lack of risk sharing results from the interplay of two factors. First, contingencies must be based on information produced by measurement systems, which may be manipulable. Second, when two parties to a contract meet, they often have incomplete information. The type of contract offered may reveal information about the party who proposes it. Different types of agents have different preferences over contingent contracts, because they have different abilities to manipulate the measurement system. These differences in preferences allow the parties to signal their types through the contracts they offer. Noncontingent contracts may be chosen in equilibrium because they are the only contracts which do not give any type an incentive to distort the measurement system and, hence, do not reveal information about the party proposing the contract.We have benefited from conversations with Oliver Hart, Rick Lambert, Michael Riordan and Jean Tirole and the comments of Michel Habib, Nick Yannelis and two anonymous referees. Financial support from the National Science Foundation under grants SES-8920048 and SES-8720589 is gratefully acknowledged.     

Limited attention and the optimal incompleteness of contracts

A decision-maker's limited attention is allocated between writingnew contracts and directing current contracts. More time spentwriting a new contract makes the contract more complete. A morecomplete contract performs better and generates higher returns.The optimal allocation of attention implies two types of contracts,relational and market. A relational contract, which is directedperiodically, is optimally less complete than a market contract,which is not directed. The completeness of relational contractsdecreases with the ability to direct contracts, since changingcircumstances can be dealt with later. In addition, the completenessof relational contracts increases with the ability to writenew contracts, since more complete relational contracts aredirected less frequently and leave more time for writing newcontracts. The optimal allocation of attention to relationalcontracts is socially efficient even though it does not maximizethe discounted expected returns of the firm.     

An equilibrium search model with optimal wage-experience contracts

The objective of this paper is to study equilibrium in a labour market, in which workers search on the job and firms offer wage contracts conditional upon workers' experience and employment status. In this environment, the optimal contract can be described by a promotion contract. The distribution of contract offers is dispersed within and across experience levels. As workers stay longer in the market and promotion dates get closer, the option value of holding a job increases. Firms offer early promotions to attract more experienced workers. A positive relation between experience and earnings can arise purely from firms' optimal response to labour market competition brought about by workers' on-the-job search. We characterise the offer distribution for each experience level and show how these change with labour market conditions.     

Demand deposit contracts,suspension of convertibility,and optimal financial intermediation

Summary This paper establishes that an optical contract, combining features of the well-known Diamond and Dybvig (1983) and Townsend (1979, 1983) models, resembles banking. The contract and the associated allocations are derived from a social planner's problem which contains the Diamond and Dybvig and Townsend models as sub-problems. The analysis accomplishes the following. It unites the liquidity preference and cost minimization literatures in a simple way; resolves the demand deposit/demand equity problem in the Diamond and Dybvig model; introduces a notion of efficient bankruptcies into the liquidity preference literature; and raises some questions about the government regulation vs. laissez faire banking debate.I wish to thank John Boyd, Joseph Haubrich, Jeffrey Lacker, Ramon Marimon, Edward C. Prescott, two anonymous referees, and especially Neil Wallace for useful comments. I also wish to thank the National Science Foundation for financial support from grant number 89-09242.     

When to fire a CEO: optimal termination in dynamic contracts

Existing models of dynamic contracts impose that it is both optimal and feasible for the contracting parties to bind themselves together forever. This paper introduces optimal termination in dynamic contracts. We modify the standard dynamic agency model to include an external labor market which, upon the dissolution of the contract, allows the firm to return to the labor market to seek a new match. Under this simple closure of the model, two types of terminations emerge. Under one scenario, the agent is fired after a bad output and he becomes too poor to be punished effectively. Under the second scenario, the agent is forced out after a good output and he becomes too expensive to motivate.     

A note on optimal procurement contracts with limited direct cost inflation

Laffont and Tirole's [Using cost observation to regulate firms, J. Polit. Econ. 94 (1986) 614-641] pioneering analysis identifies the optimal procurement contract when the supplier can readily inflate his innate production cost without detection. When the buyer has some ability to limit such cost inflation, an alternative contract can outperform the contract identified by Laffont and Tirole. The alternative contract induces substantial pooling, discontinuous production costs and effort supply, and rent that varies non-monotonically with innate cost.     

Reciprocity and matching frictions

The ability of search and matching models to replicate stylized facts—such as volatilities and correlations—has been a center of attraction over the last couple of years. This paper introduces the Akerlof (Q J Econ 97:543–569, 1982) fair wage approach into an endogenous separation search and matching model. Within a RBC general equilibrium context, we show that the efficiency wage model outperforms its benchmark Nash bargaining pendant. In particular, the model generates the empirically observed volatilities in response to a productivity shock and replicates a strong Beveridge curve. Furthermore, we derive the Solow condition in a search environment and discuss the interactions of search and efficiency wage frictions. We show that search frictions create a wedge between the optimal wage/effort solution in the search and the competitive equilibrium. The efficiency wage consideration adds an additional margin to the firm's decision problem. As effort varies over the cycle, it changes the firm's optimal response to exogenous disturbances and amplifies the response to shocks.     

Pricing and signaling with frictions

We study a market where each seller chooses the quality and price of goods and the number of selling sites. Observing sellers? choices of prices and sites, but not quality, buyers choose which site to visit. A seller?s choices of prices can direct buyers? search and signal quality. A unique equilibrium exists and is separating. When the quality differential is large, the equilibrium implements the efficient allocation with public information. Otherwise, the quality of goods and/or the number of sites created is inefficient, due to a conflict between the search-directing and signaling roles of prices.     

Search frictions and labor market participation

Cross-country differences in labor market participation are often larger than differences in unemployment rates. The same holds true across demographic groups within a given economy. We argue that the interaction between labor force participation decisions and labor market frictions can help us understand these patterns. This interaction highlights dynamic aspects of the participation decision, in contrast to standard textbook treatments that emphasize static costs and benefits of participation. We extend the standard labor market search problem to allow for a third state—non-participation—and assumes that stochastic participation costs precipitate flows into and out of non-participation. We fully characterize the worker's decision problem and use numerical simulations to demonstrate how participation patterns vary with individual characteristics and with labor market conditions.     

Political frictions and public policy outcomes

We study the role of political frictions in public policy outcomes. We propose a simple model of fiscal policy that combines a lack of commitment by the government, political turnover, and another political friction that can be interpreted either as political polarization or as public rent-seeking. We show that political turnover increases public debt levels, while political polarization or public rent-seeking leads to higher public spending. We evaluate the importance of different political frictions for fiscal policy outcomes using a sample of twenty developed countries. We find that the data on political instability combined with the data on public rent-seeking explain 25% of the variation in public debt levels.     

On the optimal design of insurance contracts with the restriction of equity risk

This paper focuses on the optimal design of insurance contracts with the restriction of equity risk by Arrow's optimal insurance model [2] and Zhou's optimal insurance model [4]. The insured aims to maximize his/her expected utility of terminal wealth, under the constraint that the insurer wishes to control his/her risk. We establish an optimal insurance model that restrains underwriting risk and investment risk simultaneously. We solve this problem and obtain the results which improve and extend the results given by Arrow [2] and Zhou [4].     

Financial frictions and the ratio in UK manufacturing

This note concerns an asymptotic distribution result from the literature on nonlinear estimation with integrated variables. It points out a way of strengthening local asymptotic distribution results towards results that hold for the global minimizer of the criterion function.     

Product diffusion and pricing with market frictions

Summary. We study pricing and product diffusion in a dynamic general equilibrium framework with product market frictions. Ongoing R&D activity leads, with an endogenously determined probability, to continual improvements in product quality. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium with endogenous product diffusion in which a number of different goods co-exist on the quality ladder. We show that the severity of the economy's market frictions is a crucial determinant of the pricing structure, the product diffusion pattern, the level of R&D investment, the rate of endogenous growth, the length of Schumpeterian product cycles and the possibility of multiple growth paths. Eliminating market frictions leads to a degenerate product ladder of precisely one step, containing only the most recent product, as in the monopolistic competition literature. Received: August 16, 1999; revised version: March 6, 2001     

Federal lending and aggregate economic activity

Attention to federal activity in credit markets is typically focused on the government's role as a borrower. In contrast, scant attention is paid to its equally large and dominant role as a lender. This paper evaluates the aggregate impact of federal lending activity within the framework of a vector autoregressive representation of the US macroeconomy. The empirical regularities uncovered suggest that aggregate federal lending activity does not have a net positive impact on output.     

Securitisation and the bank lending channel

The dramatic increase in securitisation activity experienced in Europe in the years following the introduction of the euro has altered the liquidity, credit and maturity transformation role traditionally performed by banks. We claim that the changing role of credit intermediaries due to securitisation has also modified the effectiveness of the bank lending channel and banks’ ability to grant loans. We use a novel database of securitisation activity and a large sample of European banks and find that the use of securitisation shelters banks’ loan supply from the effects of monetary policy. Securitisation activity has also strengthened banks’ capacity to supply new loans. This capacity, however, depends on business cycle conditions and, notably, on banks’ risks positions. The recent credit crisis is instructive in this respect.     

On US politics and IMF lending

The political factors shaping IMF lending to developing countries have attracted attention in recent empirical work. This goes in particular for the role and influence of the US. However, scant formal modelling makes interpretation of empirical results difficult. In this paper, we propose a model in which the US acts as principal within the IMF and seeks to maximize its impact on the policy stance of debtor countries. We derive an optimal loan allocation mechanism, which leads to the testable hypothesis that the probability of an IMF loan is increasing in the amount of political concessions countries make. A political concession is defined as the distance between a country's bliss point and its actual policy stance measured relative to the US. We introduce a bliss-point proxy and demonstrate that our hypothesis is strongly supported in the data. Moreover, we show that not accounting for bliss points may lead to endogeneity bias in empirical work.     

Mixed wage and rent contracts as reinterpretations of share contracts

This note extends the result of Stiglitz (1974) and Newbery (1977) concerning the equivalence of mixed wage and rent contracts to share contracts to the case where the only assumption is that there are no enforcement or transaction costs. This is so because an equivalent mixed wage/rent agreement can always be obtained by simply reinterpreting a share agreement.