Essays in Corporate Finance and Bargaining Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance and Bargaining Theory PDF Author: Mark Andrew Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description

Essays in Corporate Finance and Bargaining Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance and Bargaining Theory PDF Author: Mark Andrew Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description


ESSAYS IN CORPORATE FINANCE

ESSAYS IN CORPORATE FINANCE PDF Author: Edward J Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
My dissertation consists of three chapters that explore various aspects of corporate finance with a focus on issues related to corporate governance. Chapter 1 investigates how CEO bargaining power affects the level of CEO compensation. Contracting theories predict that CEO power plays an essential role in the pay-setting process. I provide causal empirical evidence of how changes in the bargaining power of CEOs affect the level of CEO compensation. Using the staggered adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts as an exogenous shock to CEOs' bargaining power, I find that the recognition of the IDD results in significantly lower levels of CEO compensation. The effect is present only in subsamples of firms whose CEOs experience a substantial decline in their bargaining power. These results support the idea that bargaining power is the channel through which the IDD recognition decreases CEO compensation. Economic impact of the IDD is also substantial in the subsamples, ranging from 16.4% to 20.5% decline in total compensation. Examination of the structure of compensation reveals that changes in the bargaining power of CEOs reduce total current compensation and option awards. The recognition of the IDD also increases turnover-performance sensitivity and shareholder wealth. Chapter 2 examines the impact of corporate religious culture on CEO compensation structure. Recent studies document the effect of corporate culture on corporate behavior. This study examines how a firm's religious culture affects the structure of CEO compensation. Using county-level religiosity as a proxy for a firm's culture, I find that firms in highly religious counties use about 12.4% less performance-based compensation in their CEO compensation packages. I consider two characteristics of religious cultures that are likely to have implications on executive compensation: extrinsic motivation and locus of control. To determine which characteristic is driving the results, I examine how turnover decisions differ depending on religious culture of firms. If locus of control - the extent to which human effort can affect future outcomes - is driving the main result, less turnover-performance sensitivity is expected in highly religious firms. The results show that turnover-performance sensitivity does not vary according to county-level religiosity, suggesting that locus of control is not the driver behind the main result. These findings indicate that firms with highly religious cultures use less performance-based compensation because religious cultures' work ethic is less financially motivated. Lastly, Chapter 3 investigates how insider-dominance of corporate boards affect firm value. The agency literature posits that insider-dominated boards are likely to face severe agency problems. However, some theories on board control argue that insider-dominated boards are sometimes optimal for shareholders. I evaluate the theories using SOX-related board reforms in the early 2000s that presented an exogenous change in board control. Specifically, I analyze the heterogenous treatment effects based on firm characteristics that theoretically favor insider-dominated boards - firm size, proprietary knowledge, and information transparency. Preliminary results suggest that firms with theoretically optimal insider-dominated boards experienced a net increase in shareholder value when boards became independent. These results indicate that benefits of enhanced monitoring by independent boards outweighed any loss in value associated with insider control of the board.

Two Essays in Corporate Finance

Two Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Emmanuel Alanis Hernandez
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this dissertation, we answer two research question in corporate finance. In the first essay, "A New Benchmark: Relative Performance Evaluation with Total Returns", we revisit the question of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in executive compensation. While previous literature has commonly rejected the use of RPE when using equity returns as performance measure, we argue that the total return of the firm is a preferable metric in RPE regressions since the exogenous common shocks analyzed in extant theory occur at the asset level. Further, it is plausible that executives are concerned about the total value of the firm since shareholders bear most of the brunt of the agency cost of other stakeholders and executives can hold nontrivial amounts of debt-like instruments. We find strong evidence in support of RPE in the compensation of top executives. In addition, we cannot reject that the magnitude of RPE used in the average contract is optimal. Overall, this essay contributes to the ongoing debate about the efficiency of executive pay. In the second essay, "Shareholder Bargaining Power, Debt Overhang, and Investment", we analyze how shareholder bargaining power affects the underinvestment problem caused by debt overhang. Using a dynamic model of strategic bargaining between equity and debt holders following default, we relate firm-specific characteristics, such as the shareholder and bondholder ownership concentration, to debt overhang and investment. Consistent with our predictions, we find expected liquidation values and bondholder ownership concentration enhance the underinvestment effect of debt overhang, while shareholder ownership concentration mitigates it. Our results highlight how shareholder bargaining power in default can affect the underinvestment problem caused by debt overhang. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/155471

Essays in Corporate Finance

Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Kangzhen Xie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation studies the effects of information asymmetry, financial constraints and stock market valuation on the behavior of firms. The first essay explores the role of deal initiation and bidder asymmetry in determining the use of auction and target premia in merges and acquisitions. The second essay examines the behavior of the segments of conglomerates and single segment firms in the distressed industries. The third essay investigates the incentive of takeover arising from the temporary disparity of stock valuation. While half of all acquisition targets are sold in negotiated deals with only one buyer rather than by auction, the wealth effects for target shareholders are surprisingly similar in both auctions and negotiations. This begs the following questions: why do companies frequently avoid auctions and instead negotiate with just one buyer, and how can targets achieve comparable premia in negotiations? Drawing on Fishman's (1988) model of preemptive bidding and Povel and Singh's (2006) model of asymmetric bidders, I hypothesize that the sales procedure (i.e., auction or negotiation) is most likely determined by the party that initiates the deal. When an acquirer initiates a deal, it prefers a negotiated deal and hence agrees to pay a high premium to preempt the target and other potential bidders from running an auction. I document detailed information on the private bargaining process for 598 deals. I find that most negotiation deals are in fact initiated by the acquirers and that most of the target-initiated deals use an auction, which indicates that targets are using an auction as a mechanism to discover the highest bidder. Moreover, I provide evidence that the targets receive higher excess returns in the deals initiated by the acquirers than in the deals initiated by the targets. I also provide further evidence of preemptive bidding and bidder asymmetry by studying the indicative bids and the business relations between the targets and the acquirers. Hence, target firms are willing to forgo the potential benefits of an auction and agree to a negotiated deal because they are already facing a bidder with a high valuation and are able to get a high price. The second essay uses economic distress in an industry as a natural experiment and tests the alternate theories of conglomeration. We find that segments of conglomerates in distressed industries experience better performance than single segment firms. The distressed segments have higher sales growth, higher R & D expenditure and greater cash flows than single segment firms. Indicating greater financial constraints for single segment firms, the superior performance of segments of conglomerates is confined to the sub-sample of firms without credit ratings and for firms in competitive industries. Single-segment firms reduce their investment in non-cash current assets and significantly increase their cash holdings during periods of industry distress. There is some evidence that the single segment firms that accumulate cash also reduce their R & D expenditure. The diversification discount almost disappears in the years when one of the conglomerate segments is in distress. Overall, our evidence highlights the benefits of conglomerates in enabling segments to avoid financial constraints during periods of industry distress. The third essay studies the effect of valuation difference on merger incentives. There is widespread evidence that bidders are more highly valued than their targets, and that both parties tend to be in temporarily high-valued industries. We find that valuation differences are also extremely important in predicting who will be acquired and when. Our evidence also suggests that the driving force is more a desire to increase earnings per share the (the "bootstrap game" in the classic text of Brealey and Myers) than to exploit market mis-valuation. We find that a firm is more likely to be a target when others in the industry could acquire them in a stock-swap merger that appears accretive to the buyer while paying the target a substantial premium. The resulting measure is similar to the dispersion of valuation multiples within an industry, but is grounded in a specific model of managerial behavior and is empirically much stronger than dispersion. Indeed, it is stronger than any measure in the existing literature, including recent industry merger activity.

Two Essays on Corporate Finance

Two Essays on Corporate Finance PDF Author: Sen Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


Essays in Corporate Finance

Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Felipe Cortés
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation seeks to understand the effect of information asymmetries on corporate liquidity choices and efficiency of bankruptcy resolution, and the role of pooling and reputational concerns on an originator's incentives to invest in signal precision. The first chapter identifies and provides a causal estimate of the economic importance of information asymmetries between corporate insiders and outsiders in equity markets on small public firms decision to hoard liquid assets. The second chapter develops a theory of securitization in which the originator's incentives to screen are endogenized and affected by reputational concerns to investigate the effect of the pooling of assets on screening and systematic risk. In the third chapter, we investigate the impact of relative bargaining power of firms over creditors during bankruptcy on ex-post firm performance, once the firm emerges out of bankruptcy. Although existing theories predict a causal link between firm opaqueness and firm cash holdings, endogenous and coarse measures of opaqueness hinder the identification of this link. Using the discontinuous requirement of financial reporting introduced by Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Section 404, we estimate the causal effect of opaqueness on cash holdings. We show that firms that comply with Section 404 and provide more reliable information exhibit lower cash holdings compared to observationally similar firms. Further, compliant firms that hold less cash exhibit higher R & D expenditures relative to non-compliant firms. This difference sheds light on the opportunity costs of holding cash. In the second chapter, we develop a theory of securitization in which the securitization of large asset pools leads to a reduction in idiosyncratic risk but an increase in systematic risk, and the originate-to-distribute model of securitization is not sufficient for this result. The model is one in which the originator's screening incentives are endogenized, and screening and pooling of loans in securitization have both idiosyncratic and systematic risk consequences. The originator's screening incentives are affected by career concerns as well as by the impact of screening on the risk of the securitized portfolio. The effect of securitization on idiosyncratic risk and systematic risk occurs via a dilution of the originator's screening incentives, with greater dilution occurring as more loans are added to the pool being securitized. Further, when we endogenize the information acquisition incentives of the investors who purchase securitized claims, we find that there is an interaction between these incentives and the screening incentives of originators. A weakening of the issuer's screening incentives leads to weaker incentives for investors to become informed and a higher valuation uncertainty, creating a feedback effect that further weakens the issuer's screening incentives. In the third chapter of my thesis evaluates the impact of bargaining between management and creditors on bankruptcy outcome and ex-post efficiency of bankruptcy resolution. We find that firms in which creditors (management) exerts greater (lower) influence in the negotiation process are more likely to be liquidated. Increase in power of creditors during the bankruptcy negotiations is associated with lower likelihood of re-filing and superior post-bankruptcy profitability among firms that emerge. However such ex-post efficiency gains come at a cost as increase in power of creditors also leads to a lengthier bankruptcy. The unique aspect of our analysis is our ability to correct for the selection bias engendered by our focus on firms that emerge out of bankruptcy using the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BACPA) passed in 2005 as an exogenous shock to the likelihood of liquidation. Collectively, our results lend credence to the idea of allocating greater power to creditors in bankruptcy proceedings.

Four Essays in Corporate Finance

Four Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Sukwhan Ahn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporate debt
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description


Essays in Corporate Finance Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory PDF Author: Dan Luo (Researcher in corporate finance theory)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three pieces of research in theoretical corporate finance. The first one studies multi-agent design problems. Agents are concerned about each other's decisions and can communicate strategically with each other. The principal would like to motivate agents' participation decisions by affecting their communication. I employ such a multi-agent perspective on economic design to understand practices such as syndication. The second and the third ones take a more applied approach and study agency problems in specific corporate finance settings. They shed light on information design in corporate governance and dynamic interactions in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), respectively.

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory PDF Author: Mr. Andrey Malenko
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thesis consists of three essays that examine various problems in corporate finance. The central theme of all essays is information asymmetry between agents. The first essay features information asymmetry between the headquarters and the division manager about investment projects of the division and studies the best way to provide the manager with incentives to invest efficiently. The second essay studies implications of asymmetric information between the decision-maker and the outsiders on exercise decisions of real options in several settings. The third essay features asymmetric information between sellers of assets and potential buyers and studies what selling procedures arise in equilibrium in a market with multiple sellers and potential buyers. More specifically, in Chapter 1 of the dissertation, I study optimal design of a capital allocation system in a firm in which the division manager with empire-building preferences privately observes the arrival and properties of investment projects, and the headquarters is able to audit each project at a cost. I show that under certain conditions the optimal system takes the form of a budgeting mechanism with threshold division of authority. Specifically, the headquarters: (i) allocates a spending account to the manager at the initial date and accumulates it over time; (ii) sets a threshold on the size of individual projects, such that all projects below the threshold are delegated to the manager and financed out of her spending account, while all projects above the threshold are audited and financed fully by the headquarters. I extend the model in several directions, including multiple audit technologies, multiple project categories, and the possibility of renegotiation. In Chapter 2, which is the product of joint work with Steven R. Grenadier, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we study games in which the decision to exercise an option is a signal of private information to outsiders, whose beliefs affect the utility of the decision-maker. In a general setting that accommodates a variety of applications we show that signaling incentives distort the timing of exercise, and the direction of distortion depends on whether the decision-maker's utility increases or decreases in the outsiders' belief about the payoff from exercise. In the former case, signaling incentives erode the value of the option to wait and speed up option exercise, while in the latter case option exercise is delayed. We demonstrate the implications of the general model through four corporate finance applications: investment under managerial myopia, venture capital grandstanding, investment under cash flow diversion, and product market competition. In Chapter 3, which is the product of joint work with\ Alexander S.\ Gorbenko, forthcoming in the American\ Economic Review, we study simultaneous security-bid second-price auctions with competition among sellers for potential bidders. The key difference from the prior literature on competition among auctioneers is that we allow bidders to make bids in the form of contingent claims on future payoffs of the assets. The sellers compete for bidders by designing ordered sets of securities that the bidders can offer as payment for the assets. Upon observing auction designs, potential bidders decide which auctions to enter. We characterize all symmetric equilibria and show that there always exist equilibria in which auctions are in standard securities or their combinations. In large markets the unique equilibrium is auctions in pure cash. We extend the model for competition in reserve prices and show that binding reserve prices never constitute equilibrium as long as equilibrium security designs are not call options.

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory PDF Author: John R. Minahan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description