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Executive stock options are provided to risk‐averse CEOs to encourage risk‐taking. We show that the efficacy of such stock options is moderated by CEOs' regulatory focus—their intrinsic motivations to avoid losses or achieve gains. We show that stock options have a negligible impact on the risk‐taking behavior of CEOs who are intrinsically motivated to avoid losses or take on risks. The impact of stock options on firm risk is strongest among CEOs whose regulatory focus is moderate and whose behavior is thus more malleable. Our paper shows that CEO intrinsic risk‐taking motivations have important implications for the effectiveness of extrinsic risk‐taking incentives provided by stock options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boards of directors encourage risk-averse managers to take risky actions by providing stock options and severance pay. We demonstrate that the ability of these incentives to encourage risk-taking hinges on the level of uncertainty facing the manager. We confirm prior findings that stock option convexity encourages risk-taking but find that this relation only holds when market-wide uncertainty is low. We also confirm prior findings that severance pay encourages risk-taking but find that this relation only holds during high market-wide uncertainty and negative market-wide performance. Finally, we find that compensation committees respond to variation in uncertainty by adjusting the level of option grants. Our results suggest that the effectiveness of incentives to take risk varies with the market-wide uncertainty, and that boards consider this in annual compensation design. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G30; G34; K22; M40; M46. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of information technology (IT) innovation in today's digitalized world, little research attention has been paid to examining how firms can incentivize IT innovation. To fill this gap, the current study investigates the impact of managerial incentives provided to chief executive officers (CEOs) on IT innovation, measured by the number of IT patents. In particular, we examine the role of risk-taking incentives provided to CEOs, captured by the sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock return volatility (i.e., Vega). Vega can motivate CEOs to engage in risky IT innovation projects by aligning their wealth with firm-specific risk. In so doing, we focus on how CEOs' IT-related human capital (i.e., IT education and IT experience) moderates the relationship between Vega and IT innovation. Our empirical analyses reveal that a higher Vega encourages CEOs to support more IT innovation; more importantly, the impact of Vega on the amount of IT patents is stronger for firms with CEOs who have higher levels of IT education and IT experience. Our study contributes to research and practice by conceptualizing a CEO's IT-related human capital and validating its moderating role in the relationship between risk-taking incentives provided to the CEO and the amount of IT innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The riskiness developed by Aumann and Serrano (J Polit Econ 116:810–836, 2008) is a measure based on mean, standard deviation and higher order moments. Instead of relying on corporate policies as indirect measures of firm risk, we theoretically show a positive relation between the value of compensation contracts with convex payoff and the firm's option implied riskiness through second-order stochastic dominance and provide supportive empirical evidence of this risk taking incentive. To address the endogeneity concern, we perform a difference-in-difference analysis using the implementation of FAS 123R in 2006, an accounting standard under which firms are required to recognize the fair value-based expense of stock option grants. Firms thereby are discouraged from granting executive stock options (ESO) because of the higher cost resulted from the strict expense recognition required by FAS 123R. Hence, the implementation of FAS 123R results in an exogenous negative shock to the use of ESO. Using this approach, we find a significant decrease in the option implied riskiness subsequent to FAS 123R, supportive of the risk-taking incentive associated with executive stock options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of CEOs' risk-taking incentives (vega), derived from their stock options, on earnings management (EMGT) by banks. Prior research finds an inconsistent relationship between vega and EMGT in non-financial firms. In the banking industry, the effect of vega on EMGT is further complicated by the strict regulatory environment. To establish causality, we exploit the exogenous reduction in vega resulting from Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R in 2005 that mandates a fair-value-based method to expense stock options and increases costs of granting option compensation. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we find that banks with a larger drop in CEO vega due to FAS 123R significantly reduce EMGT. The findings suggest that CEO vega has a positive and causal effect on bank EMGT. Our results are robust enough to employ in different research designs and specifications. Furthermore, we find that the negative effect of FAS 123R on EMGT is weaker in banks subject to a higher possibility of regulatory intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how executives' ability to control their firms' exposure to risk affects the design of their incentive-compensation contracts. Our natural experimental evidence shows that exchange-traded weather derivatives allow executives to control their firms' exposure to weather risk. Once these derivatives became available, those executives who use them to hedge experience relative reductions in their total compensation and equity incentives. The decline in compensation is consistent with a reduction in the risk premium that executives receive for exposure to weather risk. The decline in equity incentives is consistent with the relation between risk and incentives shifting in a complementary direction when executives can better control their firms' exposure to risk. Collectively, our findings provide evidence that executives' ability to control their firms' exposure and, by extension, their own to an important source of risk influences the design of their incentive-compensation contracts. JEL Classifications: G32; J33; J41. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operating leases are used extensively for financing, but their ability to separate ownership and use also creates hedging opportunities. We investigate whether firms recognize such opportunities by examining the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) risk‐taking incentives and the use of operating leases. Consistent with firms using operating leases to hedge, we find higher CEO risk‐taking incentives lower operating lease intensity. To address endogeneity, we use the adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R as an exogenous shock to option compensation, dynamic panel generalized method of moments, simultaneous equations, and change regressions. Our results are robust to placebo and alternative tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between management control mechanisms, specifically risk-taking incentives targeted at mitigating moral hazard, and cost behavior during periods of sales declines relative to periods of sales growth. We find that incentive vega of both chief executive officers and top five paid executives is associated with expedited reductions in selling, general, and administrative cost in periods of sales declines. These results are consistent with the Sedatole et al. (J Account Res 50(2):553–592, 2012) finding that incentive vega induces managers to adopt a more elastic cost structure, presumably because managerial operational decisions, particularly outsourcing, increase firms' total risk. We conduct an additional analysis to rule out an alternative explanation that the expedited cost cuts may be driven by incentives to manage earnings. Finally, our results are robust to alternative measures of risk-taking incentives. Overall, our findings support the view that management control mechanisms through risk-taking incentives are an important determinant of management cost adjustment decisions in periods of demand declines relative to periods of demand growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the association between CEO severance pay (i.e., payment a CEO would receive if s/he is involuntarily terminated) and corporate tax planning activities. We find that CEO severance pay is positively associated with corporate tax planning, consistent with CEO severance pay providing contractual protection against managers' career concerns and thereby inducing otherwise risk-averse managers to engage in incremental levels of tax planning. This result holds under an instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching, and survives alternative measures of CEO severance pay and corporate tax planning. Finally, we find that severance pay provides stronger tax planning incentives in situations where managers are expected to face greater career concerns—when they are less experienced, when they face stronger shareholder monitoring, and when they manage firms with higher idiosyncratic volatility. Overall, our results suggest that CEO severance pay represents a form of efficient contracting with otherwise risk-averse managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending recent studies on chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs), we investigate the impact of CEO and CFO risk-taking incentives on earnings guidance. We find that firms with high CEO risk-taking incentives are more likely to issue earnings guidance and issue more guidance. We also find that firms with high CFO risk-taking incentives are associated with less precise guidance, narrower forecast range, and earlier forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the association between CEO age and corporate tax planning. Using a sample of 11,537 firm‐year observations from the fiscal year 1997–2013, I find CEO age exerts an economically significant influence on firms' tax policies, incremental to economic determinants identified in prior research. Specifically, CEO age is positively related to cash and GAAP effective tax rates, and negatively related to permanent book‐tax difference, suggesting that older CEOs are less likely to take actions to lower tax burden. The results hold across different model specifications and robustness tests to address potential bias arising from endogeneity, sample selection issue, and the confounding effect of CEO tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the systemic risk of financial institutions is associated with the risk-taking incentives generated by executive compensation. We measure managerial risk-taking incentives with the sensitivities of chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO) compensation to changes in stock prices (pay-performance sensitivity) and stock return volatility (pay-risk sensitivity). Using data on large U.S. financial institutions over the period 2005–2010, we document a negative association between systemic risk and the sensitivities of CEO and CFO compensation to stock return volatility. However, our results also demonstrate that financial institutions with greater managerial risk-taking incentives were associated with significantly higher levels of systemic risk during the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. We further document that the relation between pay-performance sensitivity and systemic risk is essentially nonexistent. Overall, our empirical findings indicate that the association between managerial risk-taking incentives and banks' systemic risk is ambiguous and is not stable over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide empirical evidence of the effect of managerial risk incentives on financial reporting conservatism. We hypothesize that firms use greater accounting conservatism as a means of addressing increased firm risk arising from excessive managerial risk incentives provided by option compensation. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a positive association between excessive managerial risk incentives and accounting conservatism measured as asymmetric timeliness of loss recognition. By contrast, we find no impact by normal (anticipated) risk-taking on accounting conservatism. Further analysis shows that the association between excessive managerial risk incentives and accounting conservatism is more pronounced when firms face more severe debtholder–shareholder conflicts. We also find that while cost of debt financing is positively associated with both anticipated and excessive risk incentives, the relationship with the latter is weakened by timelier loss recognition, suggesting firms with heightened risk incentives could economically benefit from using more conservative accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relation between managers' personal income tax rates and their corporate investment decisions. Using plausibly exogenous variation in federal and state tax rates, we find a positive relation between managers' personal tax rates and their corporate risk-taking. Moreover—and consistent with our theoretical predictions—we find that this relation is stronger among firms with investment opportunities that have a relatively high rate of return per unit of risk, and stronger among CEOs who have a relatively low marginal disutility of risk. Importantly, our results are unique to senior managers' tax rates––we do not find similar relations for middle-income tax rates. Collectively, our findings provide evidence that managers' personal income taxes influence their corporate risk-taking decisions. JEL Classifications: G30; G32; G38; H24; H32. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text. Data on manager tax rates used in this paper are available at: http://acct.wharton.upenn.edu/∼dtayl/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usual measures of the risk-taking incentives of bank CEOs do not capture the risk-shifting incentives that the exposure of a CEO’s wealth to his firm’s stock price (delta) creates in highly levered firms. We find evidence consistent with the importance of these incentives for bank CEOs: In a sample of large US financial firms, a higher pre-crisis delta is associated with a significantly higher probability of failure during the 2007–10 financial crisis in highly levered firms, but not in less levered firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper shows that systemic banks are prone to increase their regulatory capital ratio through a decline in risk‐weighted assets density and an intense use of lower level capital. The market access of systemic banks and the fact that they were singled out for higher capital requirements seem to have biased them towards lower level capital, consistent with the theory that asymmetric information drives capital decisions. These effects are particularly strong for institutions that had a rather low level of capitalization at the start of the period and for those that exhibited a strong use of additional Tier I capital before the regulatory changes. Strict capital composition requirements for firms with lower buffers would be an improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a model in which shareholders provide a risk-averse CEO with risk-taking incentives in addition to effort incentives. We show that the optimal contract protects the CEO from losses for bad outcomes and is convex for medium outcomes and concave for good outcomes. We calibrate the model to data on 1,707 CEOs and show that it explains observed contracts much better than the standard model without risk-taking incentives. When we apply the model to contracts that consist of base salary, stock, and options, the results suggest that options should be issued in the money. Our model also helps us rationalize the universal use of at-the-money options when the tax code is taken into account. Moreover, we propose a new way of measuring risk-taking incentives in which the expected value added to the firm is traded off against the additional risk a CEO has to bear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a model of cash management for financially constrained firm with performance-sensitivity debt (PSD) in a stochastic financing conditions framework. In this model, stochastic financing conditions lead shareholders to have incentives for risk-taking. This paper highlights the implications of PSD on cash management and risk-taking incentives for shareholders. We find that firms with PSD issue equity earlier, and delay payout to shareholders relative to firms with straight debt. In addition, we also discover that larger performance-sensitivity leads shareholders to have stronger risk-taking incentives. • We build a model of cash management with PSD in a stochastic financing conditions framework. • Firms with PSD issue equity earlier, and delay payout to shareholders relative to firms with straight debt. • Larger performance-sensitivity leads shareholders to have stronger risk-taking incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we investigate how executive equity incentives affect companies' risktaking behavior in relationships with their customers. We hypothesize and find that executive risk-taking incentives provided by options are positively related to the degree of trade credit riskiness measured both as the amount of total trade credit a firm extends to all its customers and as the amount of trade credit a firm extends to customers with a high probability of default. We also find that the measures of trade credit riskiness are positively related to the firm's future stock return volatility, suggesting that the customer default risk inherent in customer-supplier trade credit relationships represents an important economic source of the overall supplier-firm riskiness. The findings of the study provide insights into why firms facing financial difficulties are not denied trade credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of a borrowing firm's CEO risk-taking incentives on the structure of the firm's syndicated loans. When CEO risk-taking incentives are high, syndicates are structured to facilitate better due diligence and monitoring efforts. These syndicates have a smaller number of total lenders and are more concentrated, and lead arrangers will retain a greater portion of the loan. Moreover, CEO risk-taking incentives have a lesser effect on the syndicate structure when lead arrangers have a good reputation and a prior lending relationship with a borrowing firm, while they have a greater effect on the syndicate structure when borrowing firms have low information transparency, are financially distressed or have low growth prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between managerial risk-taking incentives and hedging derivatives usage. We have three results. First, executives' risk-taking incentives are negatively related to the hedging derivatives holdings, a result consistent with equity-based compensation that promotes risk taking. Second, the indexed stock options appear to create stronger risk-taking incentives than the traditional stock options. Third, managerial risk-taking incentives are significantly related to executive stock options but not stock holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We explore the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on executive risk-taking incentives. • EPU leads to more powerful risk-taking incentives. • A rise in EPU by one standard deviation raises vega by 18.88%. • Further analysis confirms the results, including an instrumental-variable analysis, random-effects analysis, propensity score matching. We explore the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on managerial risk-taking incentives. Our analysis shows that EPU leads to more powerful risk-taking incentives. A rise in EPU by one standard deviation raises vega by 18.88%. Economic uncertainty, coupled with their own inherent risk aversion, motivates managers to be extra cautious during uncertain times, resulting in sub-optimal risk-taking. To offset this tendency for too little risk, firms provide more powerful risk-taking incentives to induce managers to be more aggressive. Further analysis confirms the results, including an instrumental-variable analysis, random-effects analysis, propensity score matching, and using two alternative measures of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]