The CEO pay slice

We investigate the relation between the CEO Pay Slice (CPS)—the fraction of the aggregate compensation of the top-five executive team captured by the Chief Executive Officer—and the value, performance, and behavior of public firms. The CPS could reflect the relative importance of the CEO as well as the extent to which the CEO is able to extracts rents. We find that, controlling for all standard controls, CPS is negatively associated with firm value as measured by industry-adjusted Tobin's q. CPS also has a rich set of relations with firms' behavior and performance. In particular, CPS is correlated with lower (industry-adjusted) accounting profitability, lower stock returns accompanying acquisitions announced by the firm and higher likelihood of a negative stock return accompanying such announcements, higher odds of the CEO receiving a lucky option grant at the lowest price of the month, lower performance sensitivity of CEO turnover, and lower stock market returns accompanying the filing of proxy statements for periods when CPS increases. Taken together, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that higher CPS is associated with agency problems and indicate that CPS can provide a useful tool for studying the performance and behavior of firms.     

How to Tie Equity Compensation to Long-Term Results

Companies, investors, and regulators around the world are now seeking to tie executives' payoffs to long-term results and avoid rewarding executives for short-term gains. Focusing on equity-based compensation, the primary component of top executives' pay, the authors analyze how such compensation should best be structured to provide executives with incentives to focus on long-term value creation.
To improve the link between equity compensation and long-term results, the authors recommend that executives be prevented from unwinding their equity incentives for a significant time period after vesting. At the same time, however, the authors suggest that it would be counterproductive to require that executives hold their equity incentives until retirement, as some have proposed. Instead, the authors recommend that companies adopt a combination of grant-based and aggregate limitations on the unwinding of equity incentives.
Grant-based limitations would allow executives to unwind the equity incentives associated with a particular grant only gradually after vesting, according to a fixed, pre-specified schedule put in place at the time of the grant. Aggregate limitations on unwinding would prevent an executive from unloading more than a specified fraction of the executive's freely disposable equity incentives in any given year.
Finally, the authors emphasize the need for effective limitations on executives' use of hedging and derivative transactions that would weaken the connection between executive payoffs and long-term stock values that a well-designed equity arrangement should produce.     

国际白领犯罪与国际化的内部调查

目前已有较多作者对律师高效、全面、可靠地进行内部调查的方法进行了探究。〔1〕然而,本文尝试在全球化的背景下聚焦律师在调查潜在的国际白领犯罪活动中所遇到的挑战。本文第一部分将考察在选择律师进行海外内部调查时所遇到的挑战,同时将特别考虑适用律师-委托人特免权和工作成果保护制度的国际标准;第二部分将讨论不同国家隐私保护相关法律的影响,并分析在这些国家的司法环境中尝试进行美国式内部调查所带来的挑战;第三部分将考察国际内部调查中律师与(被调查公司)雇员的相互关系,及遵守世界各国千差万别的劳动法律法规及相应程序时所面临的挑战;最后一部分将讨论以政府为主体开展的多国调查存在的问题。本文将特别探讨如何披露调查结果,以及在国际执行环境下参与结案谈判所遇到的困难。     

The effects of insider trading on insiders effort in good and bad times

We analyze the effects of insider trading on insiders' effort decisions and on the value of firms. We consider a situation in which the final output of a firm and the productivity of managerial effort will depend on whether the firm is in a good or a bad state. When the state is not verifiable, the managerial contract cannot be made explicitly contingent on it: consequently, a contract that does not allow for insider trading would lead to the insiders' facing the same incentive scheme in good and bad times. Under a contract that allows for insider trading, however, insiders will buy shares on receiving (ahead of the market) good news and will sell shares on receiving bad news; consequently, they will end up facing different incentive scheme in good and bad times. Whether this effect is desirable depends on how the marginal productivity of managerial effort in good times compares with that in bad times. In particular, we show that allowing insider trading may improve managers' effort decisions and consequently may increase corporate value and benefit shareholders.     

Ex Ante Costs of Violating Absolute Priority in Bankruptcy

A basic question for the design of bankruptcy law concerns whether value should be divided in accordance with absolute priority. Research done in the past decade has suggested that deviations from absolute priority have beneficial ex ante effects. In contrast, this paper shows that ex post deviations from absolute priority also have negative effects on ex ante decisions taken by shareholders. Such deviations aggravate the moral hazard problem with respect to project choice—increasing the equityholders' incentive to favor risky projects—as well as with respect to borrowing and dividend decisions.