Information asymmetry,contract design and process of negotiation: The stock options awarding case

Stock option plans are used to increase managerial incentives, and business practices usually set the exercise price equal to the stock market price. The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of a process of negotiation leading to a possible equilibrium contract satisfying both managers and shareholders. The two key variables of the model are the percentage of equity capital offered by the shareholders to the managers and the exercise price of the options that may be at a discount. We explicitly introduce risk aversion and information asymmetries in the form of (i) an economic uncertainty in the gain of cash flow, (ii) possibly biased information between the two parties and (iii) a noise in the valuation price of the stock in the market. The existence of a process of negotiation between shareholders and managers leading to a possible disclosure of private information is highlighted. As a conclusion, we show that “efficient” stock option plans should be granted in a context of trade-off between the percentage of capital awarded to managers and the discount in stock price.     

Time-series implications of aggregate dividend behavior

This article investigates the hypothesis that dividend changesare determined by changes in some measure of permanent earnings.The analysis employs two measures of permanent earnings andtakes into account the nonstationarity of dividend and earningsseries. This study finds that dynamic dividend behavior is accountedfor primarily by changes in permanent earnings. dividends respondstrongly to permanent changes in earnings without any significantover-reaction, whereas they respond little, if at all, to transitorychanges in earnings. The findings also suggest that the partialadjustment hypothesis, which assumes managers partially adjustdividends to a target dividend, performs better when the targetdividend level is proportional to permanent earnings than whenit is proportional to current earnings.     

An empirical investigation of procurement contract structures

This article presents a model of procurement contracting with asymmetric cost information and investigates whether two of the model's predictions are consistent with actual contracts between hospitals and California's Medicaid program. The article first tests for the presence of a fixed-price payment region where Medicaid's payments are independent of hospitals' actual (but unobservable) production costs and then tests whether the size of the fixed-price region depends upon expectations about hospitals' costs. To conduct these tests, the article must first estimate hospitals' "unobservable" costs attributable to Medicaid patients. The article finds evidence of a fixed-price region but cannot confirm that the size of the fixed-price region depends upon expectations about hospitals' costs.     

Economic Integration, Factor Mobility, and Wage Convergence

This paper studies the effect of economic integrationof two regions on the mobility of skilled and unskilled workersacross regions and on the resulting location of industrial activity.In particular, we study what happens when wages in both regionsare set by the unions of the West—the region with agreater initial relative stock of human capital. We show thatunder some circumstances, it is the interest of the West's unionsto set up a speed of wage convergence greater than equilibrium,thus generating unemployment in the East. This slows the migrationof human capital toward the East, but quickens the migrationof raw labor toward the West. A greater share of economic activityis eventually located in the Western region. Unions in the Westwill benefit from this provided human capital has low migrationcosts relative to raw labor.     

Indeterminacy, aggregate demand, and the real business cycle

We show that under indeterminacy aggregate demand shocks are able to explain not only aspects of actual fluctuations that standard RBC models predict fairly well, but also aspects of actual fluctuations that standard RBC models cannot explain, such as the hump-shaped, trend reverting impulse responses to transitory shocks found in US output (Cogley and Nason, Am. Econom. Rev. 85 (1995) 492); the large forecastable movements and comovements of output, consumption and hours (Rotemberg and Woodford, Am. Econom. Rev. 86 (1996) 71); and the fact that consumption appears to lead output and investment over the business cycle. Indeterminacy arises in our model due to capacity utilization and mild increasing returns to scale.     

Time-to-build, monetary shocks, and aggregate fluctuations

The idea that the investment process takes time to produce finished capital goods was an integral part of Kydland and Prescott's early work on real business cycles, but this feature has been dropped in much recent work, mainly because it seemed to have little effect on macroeconomic dynamics. With a generalization of the “time-to-build” feature that incorporates multiple types of capital, however, a New Keynesian model can produce “u-shaped” responses in output, investment, and inflation to a monetary policy shock. Such responses are not found in many studies that assume no time-to-build friction. In addition, different specifications of the time-to-build structure result in substantially different response patterns for these aggregate variables.     

Adjustment costs,durables, and aggregate consumption

Previous tests of the permanent-income hypothesis (PIH) have focused on either non-durables or durables expenditures in isolation. This paper studies consumer purchases of non-durables and durables as the outcome of a single optimization problem. It is shown that, with non-separability in utility, the presence of adjustment costs of changing durables stocks may affect the time series properties of both components of expenditure. An econometric test of the PIH based on the model developed in the paper is both more efficient and less prone to bias than those in some previous studies; however, this test confirms earlier rejections of the PIH in aggregate quarterly data.     

The interrelationship between price and output decisions and investment decisions: Microfoundations and aggregate implications

This paper develops a model of firm behavior in which both price and output decisions and investment decisions are made. The model permits an analysis of the dynamics of inventory and capital accumulation on price and output behavior. There are two main results: (1) Short-run price and output levels will differ from long-run levels as desired stocks of inventory and capital diverge from actual levels. (2) The size of the elasticities of price and output to changes in demand and cost variables depends on the speed with which gaps between desired and actual stocks are closed through investment.     

Investment,agency conflicts,debt maturity,and loan guarantees by negotiation

We consider an irreversible investment, of which the sunk cost is financed by a finite-term debt after entering into an option-for-guarantee swap (OGS) with negotiation. The OGS is a three-party agreement among a lender (bank), an insurer, and a borrower (entrepreneur), where the bank lends at a given interest rate to the entrepreneur and if the borrower defaults on debt, the insurer must pay all the principal and remaining interests to the lender instead of the borrower. In return for the guarantee, the borrower must allocate a perpetual American call option to purchase a fraction (guarantee cost) of his equity at a given strike price. We find that the investment threshold decreases but the exercise threshold of the insurer’s option increases with the borrower’s bargaining power. Both the investment and exercise threshold increase with debt maturity, but there is a U-shaped relation between the guarantee cost and debt maturity. The borrower postpones investment once the funding gap or project risk increases. The swap may overcome the inefficiencies from asset substitution and debt overhang, strongly depending on the debt maturity and borrower’s bargaining power.     

Interest rates,aggregate information,and monetary policy

Interest rates set on economy-wide markets represent an important source of information to economic agents, within the class of business cycle models advanced by Lucas and Barro. This paper explores the information conveyed by such aggregate signals and the types of monetary policies that can influence economic activity by changing the information content of interest rates.     

Globalization and the Gender Wage Gap

There are several theoretical reasons why globalization willhave a narrowing as well as a widening effect on the genderwage gap, but little is known about the actual impact, exceptfor some country studies. This study contributes to the literaturein three respects. First, it is a large cross-country studyof the impact of globalization on the gender wage gap. Second,it employs the rarely used ILO October Inquiry database, whichis the most far-ranging survey of wages around the world. Third,it focuses on the within-occupation gender wage gap, an alternativeto the commonly used raw and residual wage gaps as a measureof the gender wage gap. This study finds that the occupationalgender wage gap tends to decrease with increasing economic development,at least in richer countries, and to decrease with trade andforeign direct investment (FDI) in richer countries, but findslittle evidence that trade and FDI also reduce the occupationalgender wage gap in poorer countries.     

Microeconomic uncertainty,international trade,and aggregate fluctuations

The extent and direction of causation between micro volatility and business cycles are debated. We examine, empirically and theoretically, the source and effects of fluctuations in the dispersion of producer-level sales and production over the business cycle. On the theoretical side, we study the effect of exogenous first- and second-moment shocks to producer-level productivity in a two-country DSGE model with heterogeneous producers and an endogenous dynamic export participation decision. First-moment shocks cause endogenous fluctuations in producer-level dispersion by reallocating production internationally, while second-moment shocks lead to increases in trade relative to GDP in recessions. Empirically, using detailed product-level data in the motor vehicle industry and industry-level data of U.S. manufacturers, we find evidence that international reallocation is indeed important for understanding cross-industry variation in cyclical patterns of measured dispersion.     

Accruals,cash flows,and aggregate stock returns

This paper examines whether the firm-level accrual and cash flow effects extend to the aggregate stock market. In sharp contrast to previous firm-level findings, aggregate accruals is a strong positive time series predictor of aggregate stock returns, and cash flows is a negative predictor. In addition, innovations in accruals are negatively contemporaneously correlated with aggregate returns, and innovations in cash flows are positively correlated with returns. These findings suggest that innovations in accruals and cash flows contain information about changes in discount rates, or that firms manage earnings in response to marketwide undervaluation.     

Sticky Price Models,Durable Goods,and Real Wage Rigidities

The standard two‐sector New Keynesian model with durable goods is at odds with conventional wisdom and vector autoregression (VAR) evidence: Following a monetary shock, the model generates (i) either negative or no comovement across sectoral outputs and (ii) aggregate neutrality of money when durable goods' prices are flexible. We reconcile theory with evidence by incorporating real wage rigidities into the standard model: As long as durable goods' prices are more flexible than nondurable goods' prices, we obtain positive sectoral comovement and, thus, aggregate nonneutrality of money.     

Stock returns,aggregate earnings surprises,and behavioral finance

We study the stock market's reaction to aggregate earnings news. Prior research shows that, for individual firms, stock prices react positively to earnings news but require several quarters to fully reflect the information in earnings. We find a substantially different pattern in aggregate data. First, returns are unrelated to past earnings, suggesting that prices neither underreact nor overreact to aggregate earnings news. Second, aggregate returns correlate negatively with concurrent earnings; over the last 30 years, for example, stock prices increased 5.7% in quarters with negative earnings growth and only 2.1% otherwise. This finding suggests that earnings and discount rates move together over time and provides new evidence that discount-rate shocks explain a significant fraction of aggregate stock returns.     

Real Wage Rigidities and the Cost of Disinflations

This paper analyzes the cost of disinflations under real wage rigidities in a micro-founded New Keynesian model. The conventional view is that real wage rigidities can be a useful mechanism to generate a slump in output after a credible disinflationary policy because they prevent the immediate adjustment of inflation. This view is flawed, since it depends on analyzing the model in a linearized framework. Once nonlinearities are taken into account, the results change both qualitatively and quantitatively. Disinflations actually lead to a permanently higher level of output, and real wage rigidities increase the output during the adjustment to the new steady state.     

Negotiating contract types and contract clauses in the German construction industry during the Third Reich

This article examines the determinants of contractual form and renegotiations in the German construction industry during the Third Reich. At the beginning of World War II, firms dealt with growing uncertainty by convincing procurement agencies either to use cost‐plus contracts or to include an additional risk premium in fixed‐price contracts. In the later years of the war, procurement agencies initiated renegotiations over contract clauses to reduce the extraordinary profits resulting from information rents and high‐risk premiums. This regulatory course undermined the credibility of the regulatory commitment, thereby weakening the incentives of the fixed‐price contracts still in use.