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We study the impact of creditor control rights increases on rank-and-file employees. Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide evidence that workplace safety deteriorates when creditors gain bargaining power in the event of a debt covenant violation. The frequency of workplace injuries and illnesses increase more for firms with severe financing constraints and a less active labor union. These results are robust to entropy balancing and a host of alternative specifications. In sum, our results provide compelling evidence on how increased interference and cost-cutting pressures by creditors can impair the working conditions of employees.

One of the most critical decisions top management in corporate groups has to make is the allocation of resources among competing investment opportunities across the group. Information asymmetry between the parent and subsidiaries, however, creates agency conflicts that complicate such allocation. Exploiting the adoption of more rigorous, international accounting standards by UK subsidiaries, we examine whether accounting information can mitigate these agency costs. We find that adopting subsidiaries have greater cash holdings, receive more group borrowings and pay less dividends. These findings are consistent with accounting effecting agency costs of excess cash. Further, we find that adopting subsidiaries have greater (lower) capital expenditures when in growing (declining) industries and invest more in innovation.

We examine the impact of employee incentives on firms’ tax planning. Labor mobility refers to the flexibility of workers to find alternative employment. Higher labor mobility increases expected labor adjustment costs for firms and increases employees’ bargaining power. Therefore, firms have strong incentives to make decisions in line with employees’ preferences when labor mobility is high. Using a sample of U.S. firms from 1993-2015, we find evidence that higher labor mobility is positively associated with cash effective tax rates and negatively associated with the volatility of cash effective tax rates. Results imply that firms engage in less tax avoidance when labor mobility is higher. We find stronger results for less unionized industries and environments with lower employment security. We provide evidence of a causal effect of labor mobility on tax planning by exploiting changes in state real estate transfer taxes.

Using a comprehensive sample of US banks for years 2001 to 2016, we split the pay gap between the CEO and rank-and-file employees into two: CEO pay gap and VP pay gap. We examine the effect on bank performance of the tournament incentives arising from these different pay gaps. We find that CEO pay gap is positively associated with bank performance and negatively associated with bank risk while VP pay gap is positively associated with bank risk. We show that only executive pay is sensitive to bank performance, which might explain the differing results for the association between pay gap and bank performance for the two groups. Further analysis suggests that the positive association between VP pay gap and bank risk is at least partly driven by the quantity and quality of loan origination. Finally, we show that the VP pay gap is associated with insufficient loan loss provisions consistent with increased unexpected rank-and-file employee risk taking.

We posit that when a subject firm has greater accounting comparability with industry peer firms it facilitates that firm’s learning from peer firm investments leading to better investments by the subject firm. Therefore, we expect firms with greater accounting comparability with industry peers to generate more and higher quality innovations, which are key determinants of corporate innovative efficiency. In the cross-section, we expect that the benefits from learning are likely greater (smaller) when peer-firms are successful (unsuccessful) innovators. Moreover, we expect the benefits of greater accounting comparability to be greater in highly competitive business environments. We find that accounting comparability with peer firms is positively associated with innovative efficiency of subject firms. Moreover, this association is stronger when peers have successful innovations and for firms in industries with high product similarity and strong product market competition.

This paper investigates the relation between foreign experience and CEO compensation. Using a sample of large UK firms from the FTSE 350 index from 2003 to 2011, we find that foreign-born CEOs and national CEOs with foreign working experience receive significantly higher levels of total compensation compared to those without these characteristics. We document that this foreign-CEO pay premium is stronger in firms that are more globalized. The results are robust to controlling for firm-specific economic and corporate governance characteristics as well as the endogenous CEO selection using propensity score matching. Our results show that the foreign-CEO pay premium is attributed to specialized foreign expertise rather than broader general managerial skills.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires management and board of directors to be involved in establishing and maintaining good quality internal control systems and the evaluation and disclosure of any deficiencies or weaknesses that could potentially result in a material error. We find that venture capital backing is negatively associated with disclosures of material weaknesses in internal control. We show that material weakness disclosure is much more likely to be informative for firms backed by VCs: material weakness disclosure is followed by subsequent financial restatements for VC-backed firms, but not other firms. Furthermore, we find that firms backed by more reputable VCs have more effective controls as evaluated by management and auditors.

This paper identifies a new incentive for managers to engage in corporate fraud stemming from the relative performance evaluation feature of CEO promotion tournaments. We document higher propensities to engage in fraud for firms with strong tournament incentives (as proxied for by the CEO pay gap). We posit that the relative performance evaluation feature of CEO promotion tournaments creates incentives to manipulate performance, while the option-like character can motivate managers to engage in risky activities. We thereby extend previous corporate fraud literature that focuses mainly on equity-based incentives and reports mixed findings. Our results are robust to using different fraud samples, and controlling for other known determinants of fraud as well as manager skills.

Prior research documents that analysts produce less biased forecasts for stocks with high institutional ownership. We show that this result holds only for long-term institutional investors. In the presence of short-term institutional investors, such as hedge funds, analysts strategically bias their forecasts, specifically, they issue optimistic target prices, but not earnings forecasts. Analysts bias target prices, but not earnings estimates, because this strategy reduces the likelihood the market will recognize their catering behavior. Correspondingly, we find that the market fails to see through analyst incentives and reacts favorably to target price revisions for stocks with high short-term ownership. Short-term institutional investors take advantage of temporary stock overpricing to offload their holdings to retail traders. They also reward brokers engaging in catering with higher future trades channeled through the broker. Together, our results identify a new source of conflicts of interest in analyst research that originates from the ownership composition of a stock.

The hedge fund industry often boasts that it delivers superior returns compared to alternative investments. We document that one reason behind this success is because sell-side analysts issue optimistic research forecasts that facilitate profitable trades by hedge funds. Investors do not see through analyst incentives to cater to hedge fund trades and react more strongly to analyst forecasts issued for stocks with large hedge fund holdings. Hedge funds take advantage of temporary stock overpricing and sell their holdings in stocks where analysts issued optimistic forecasts. Analysts cater to hedge funds in return for broker votes, which are an important determinant of analyst compensation and career outcomes. Our evidence on collusion between analysts and hedge funds partially explains the success of the hedge fund industry.

Portfolio optimization with private equity is based on one of three different indices: listed private equity indices, transaction-based private equity indices, and appraisal value based private equity indices. We show that none of these indices are appropriate for portfolio optimization. We introduce a new benchmark index for buyouts and venture capital. Our benchmark is updated monthly, adjusted for autocorrelation (de-smoothing) and available contemporaneously. We show our benchmark enables superior quantitative portfolio optimization.

This paper tests the idea that financial regulation can impact performance persistence in the context of the hedge fund industry in 48 countries over the years 1994–2008. The data show evidence of three types of regulation influencing performance persistence: (1) minimum capital restrictions, which restrict lower quality funds and hence increase the likelihood of performance persistence, (2) restrictions on location of key service providers, which restrict human capital choices and hence tend to mitigate performance persistence, and (3) distribution channels, which make fund performance more opaque, decrease the likelihood of performance persistence. We do not find evidence that distribution channels, that promote fund presence to institutional investors, enhance performance persistence. Finally, we show differences in the effect of regulation on persistence by fund quartile ranking.

This paper introduces a new framework for strategic asset allocation with alternative investments (buyouts, commodities, hedge funds, REITs, and venture capital). Our approach is not based on a utility function, but on an easily quantifiable risk preference parameter, λ. We account for higher moments of the return distributions within our optimization framework and approximate best-fit distributions. Thus, we replace the empirical return distributions, which are often skewed and/or exhibit excess kurtosis, with two normal distributions. We then use the estimated return distributions in the strategic asset allocation. Our results show in various out-of-sample analyses that our framework yields superior results compared to the Markowitz framework. Furthermore, our framework better manages regime switches, which tend to occur frequently during crises. To test our results for stability and robustness, we use, among other things time-varying correlation structures in the return distributions and weight restrictions for the asset classes.