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Essays on CEO Behavior

Essays on CEO Behavior
Author: Jackson Mills
Publisher:
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:
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This dissertation is composed of two essays that examine the feedback between firm financial characteristics and CEO behavioral tendencies. The first essay examines the relationship between CEOs' facial width-to-height ratios (fWHR) and firms' financial policies. Greater facial width is considered to be a masculine physical trait and has been linked to increased aggressive behavior and greater risk tolerance. I find that high-fWHR CEOs pursue more aggressive financial policies, including increased leverage and reduced cash holdings. Additionally, I find that high-fWHR CEOs tend to maintain smaller ownership shares of their firms, suggesting that these CEOs place relatively lower importance on signaling alignment with shareholders. I also show that acquisition attempts led by high-fWHR CEOs are more likely to be unsuccessful. Despite that these managerial characteristics in high-fWHR CEOs are not offset by greater profitability, I find that high-fWHR CEOs do not face a greater risk of forced turnover. In the second essay, I examine CEOs' option-exercise decisions. The retention of deep in-the-money stock options has been ascribed to managers' overconfidence in their ability to increase firm value. I find that this behavior is predicted by non-private firm financial information and macroeconomic conditions. Specifically, managers are more likely to retain deep in-the-money stock options when their firms are more profitable, less financially constrained, and have greater growth opportunities. This behavior is also more frequently exhibited during periods of macroeconomic expansion. Given its apparent reactionary nature, this behavior seems to be a reflection of managers' optimism regarding the near-term financial prospects of their firms and is not necessarily attributable to managerial overconfidence.

Essays on CEO Overconfidence

Essays on CEO Overconfidence
Author: Neslihan Yilmaz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2009
Genre: Chief executive officers
ISBN:
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Essays in Corporate Governance

Essays in Corporate Governance
Author: Jared Ian Wilson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2016
Genre: Boards of directors
ISBN:
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Corporate governance examines the mechanisms through which managers and directors are incentivized to act in the best interests of shareholders. The three essays of this dissertation focus on internal and external control mechanisms in the CEO and director labor markets and their effectiveness in aligning the interests of mangers, directors and shareholders. The first essay examines the influence of industry shocks and peer firms on board monitoring decisions. Recent evidence documents that industry factors influence CEO turnover decisions, despite agency theory's proposition that boards should filter out industry shocks when evaluating CEO performance. Consistent with industry dynamics affecting board monitoring decisions, I document that industries exhibit CEO turnover waves. During these periods of abnormally high turnover, executives face a heightened threat of discipline as boards increase turnover-performance sensitivity. This increased scrutiny inside waves represents a meaningful managerial incentive that curbs value-destroying behavior of CEOs. Overall, this essay documents the existence of CEO turnover waves, which motivate boards to monitor management differently and have real effects on CEO behavior and shareholder wealth. The second essay examines the shareholder wealth effects associated with a required venue for shareholder litigation. In response to the increased threat of shareholder litigation filed in multiple states, firms have adopted exclusive forum provisions which limit lawsuits to a single venue of the board's choice. It is unclear whether these provisions impose increased costs on shareholders' ability to discipline managers and directors or provide benefits to shareholders by eliminating multi-forum and duplicative lawsuits. I use the Delaware Chancery Court's announcement upholding the adoption of these provisions as a natural experiment to evaluate their wealth implications. Overall, this essay suggests that exclusive forum provisions create value for shareholders by specifying a required venue for corporate litigation. The final essay, with David Becher and Ralph Walkling, examines the stability and composition of acquirer boards around mergers and the director characteristics associated with selection for the post-merger board. Our results indicate that the post-merger board changes substantially and variation is significantly different from both non-merger years and non-merging firms. Adjustments reflect firms upgrading skills associated with executive and merger experience and bargaining between targets and acquirers, rather than agency motives. Conversely, director selection at non-merging firms is driven by general skills and diversity. Our analyses provide insight into the dynamic nature of board structure and characteristics valued in the director labor market.

Executive Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Antecedents and the Consequences, and the Role of Executive Personality

Executive Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Antecedents and the Consequences, and the Role of Executive Personality
Author: Steffen Florian Burkert
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3947095104
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Top managers have a significant impact on organizations because they are responsible for the formulation and implementation of corporate strategies, have the visibility and influence to shape the opinions of internal and external stakeholders, and coin the culture of their organizations, affecting employees at every level of the organization. Research has focused on the drivers and consequences of top managers' actions, with a particular focus on executive compensation, but important questions remain unanswered. This dissertation contributes to the literature on top executives by examining the antecedents of executive compensation, the influence of executive compensation on executive behavior, and the interplay of executive compensation and top executive personality. The first study introduces the role of compensation benchmarking for determining executive compensation to the management literature. It finds that benchmarking leads to compensation convergence. The second study examines the impact of executive compensation complexity on firm performance. The results show that compensation complexity is negatively related to accounting-based, market-based, and ESG-based metric of firm performance. The third study explores the implications of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on the imitation behavior of firms. It finds that the introduction of RPE is positively related to the imitation of the strategic actions of peer firms. The fourth study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of corporate social performance (CSP) goals in CEO contracts. Specifically, it examines how and when CSP incentives influence the CEO's attention to corporate social responsibility topics. The final essay examines the role of CEO personality; it finds that differences in CEO personality explain differences in the level of strategic conformity. Taken together, the essays in this dissertation make a significant contribution to the scholarly discourse on the influence of top managers on their companies. The empirical evidence presented expands the current understanding of how top executives affect strategic firm behaviors, and it provides insights for policymakers, managers, and investors.

Three Essays on Ethical Corporate Behavior

Three Essays on Ethical Corporate Behavior
Author: Sonal Kumar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:
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The first essay extends the literature on how social and organizational discrimination in the form of glass ceiling, interact with managerial traits in shaping observed leadership effectiveness. We show that when the population of CEOs is stratified by ethnicity and gender, the colored female CEO emerges as the best performing while the white male CEO is consigned among the worst performers. Additionally, the transition from male to female CEOs seems to follow corporate down- turn and precede an upturn. Furthermore, the upswing is strongest following a transition from white male to colored female CEO. We attribute these observed differences between the groups to the existence of the glass ceiling. Discriminatory selection and promotion process potentially imposes much higher demands on candidates belonging to the discriminated group. Thus, the level of ability of the successful average colored female is much higher than those of the average white male CEO. These results potentially have important implications for both policy and research. The second essay examines whether gender discrimination after women are elevated to positions of power impacts financial reporting quality. Specifically, we extend the literature by using role congruity theory and glass cliff hypothesis to examine the earnings management behavior of female chief executive officers (CEOs) conditional on the power they hold. We find that female CEOs do not necessarily reduce earnings management. For CEOs holding less power, women CEOs demonstrate lower earnings management relative to their male counterparts. However with increased power, we find women and male CEOs to exhibit similar earnings management behaviors. Thus, the earnings management behaviors of women CEOs are not solely dictated by their risk-taking and ethical attitudes, but by the existence of glass cliffs which imposes high demands on women CEOs to conform to their gender roles. The final essay examines the stock price changes to the firm's strategic choice towards symbolic and substantive CSR. Our results indicate that stock prices react differently to symbolic and substantive CSR. Symbolic CSR is used as a means to repair reputational damage following a corporate controversy and attracts a positive stock price change consistent with stakeholder wealth maximization theory. In contrast, substantive CSR, undertaken to conform long-term commitment towards CSR is perceived as over-investment by managers in the manifestation of agency leading to a negative stock return-substantive CSR relation. However, no such negative relation between stock returns and substantive CSR is found for a subset of family firms, where the controlling families have a personal interest in the long-term performance of the firm. Overall, the results indicate that the stock market responds to the nature of CSR activities.

Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance

Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance
Author: Hui Zheng
Publisher:
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:
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This dissertation explores the extent to which managerial overconfidence affects corporate decisions. This analysis includes three essays, which address a wide range of corporate decisions including financing, investment, acquisition, innovation, liquidity management and advertising decisions. The first essay introduces a fine-tuned test of the relationship between managerial overconfidence and corporate decisions by taking the chief financial officer (CFO) overconfidence effect into account. Ex-ante, I identify financial policies and non-financial policies such as investment, innovation and acquisition as the primary managerial duties of CFOs and chief executive officers (CEOs) respectively. I construct overconfidence measures for both CEOs and CFOs and test the impact of CEO and CFO overconfidence, both on financial decisions and on nonfinancial decisions. Based on a sample of 1,173 S & P 1500 firms, I find that financial policies are primarily affected by CFO overconfidence while only CEO overconfidence affects nonfinancial decisions. My findings demonstrate that managerial biases affect corporate decisions and managerial duties shape the ways in which top managers influence corporate policies. The second essay investigates how overconfident CEOs allocate resources toward innovation activities. It argues that overconfident CEOs tend to have greater innovation input. To finance innovation, they save more cash out of the cash flow and spend more on innovation when the cash flow is high. Results from an empirical analysis of 1,015 S & P 1500 firms support this argument. Moreover, based on a series of financial constraint measurements, the effect of CEO overconfidence on liquidity management is found to be more pronounced in financially constrained firms and in highly innovative firms, but not in firms without financial constraints. With regards to innovation performance, overconfident CEOs tend to have more patents, but the overall quality of their patents is not significantly better than that of rational CEOs. The third essay introduces a simple model of firm advertising behavior in monopolistic competition industries and applies it to the situation of managerial overconfidence. The model shows that the optimal advertising to sales ratio is determined by both firm advertising competency and consumer preference. Overconfident CEOs are more willing to use advertising as a means to convey the quality of their firms and products. Such overestimation of the effects of advertising by overconfident CEOs will result in overspending on advertising. When financially constrained, an overconfident CEO's tendency to overspend will be curbed to some extent, but his amount of advertising will increase with cash flows. An empirical analysis of 654 S & P 1500 firms supports these predictions. The distorted effect of managerial overconfidence is more prominent when firms are financially constrained and when the overconfidence measure is continuous.

Essays on CEO Compensation

Essays on CEO Compensation
Author: Scott William O'Brien
Publisher:
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:
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The two essays of my dissertation examine issues concerning CEO compensation. First, I examine the use of relative performance evaluation (RPE), asymmetry in pay for skill/luck, and compensation benchmarking for a sample of firms involved in a spinoff. The spinoff affects firm characteristics that influence the use of these compensation practices. I find that RPE is used for post-spinoff CEOs, but not pre-spinoff CEOs. This result is consistent with RPE being more prevalent as performance benchmark firms are easier to identify. Post-spinoff CEOs are also paid asymmetrically for luck where they are rewarded for good luck but not punished for bad luck. Both pre- and post- spinoff CEOs receive similar levels of compensation benchmarking. Second, I study the role of reference points in CEO compensation. Using two samples, I identify multiple reference points and link the reference points to the behavioral phenomena of prospect theory and anchoring-and-adjusting. In a sample of CEOs who move from one company to another (mover sample), I estimate the CEOs' expected gain or loss in compensation as a result of the move, but do not find the effects of the expected gain or loss to be consistent with prospect theory preferences. Also in the mover sample, I find evidence of anchoring-and-adjusting where the compensation of the incoming CEO's predecessor (anchor) affects the compensation of the incoming CEO. Lastly, I find evidence that fiscal year high and low prices act as reference points where drops from the fiscal year high price to the fiscal year end price result in larger decreases in compensation than increases in compensation from the fiscal year low price to the fiscal year end price, consistent with prospect theory.

Investigating Executive Traits and Corporate Actions

Investigating Executive Traits and Corporate Actions
Author: Wenqiao Zhang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:
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This dissertation includes three essays on executive traits and various corporate consequences. In the first essay, we document a unique type of CEOs who are not always selfish, that is, altruistic CEOs. Specifically, we find evidence that when faced with weak corporate governance, altruistic CEOs are less likely to initiate value-destroying acquisitions, where we construct altruistic CEOs using their personal donation records to charities. Furthermore, this difference between altruistic CEOs and their peers are stronger when corporate governance is weaker, indicating that not all CEOs are always self-interested. In addition to corporate takeovers, we show that altruistic CEOs are less likely to engage in corporate wrongful activities, resulting in fewer lawsuits against the firm, fewer earnings manipulations, and lower insider trading profits. We contribute to the standard agency theory by showing that managers are not universally self-interested and identify a possible measure to spot more selfless managers by using charitable donations. In the second essay, we find that firms managed by CEOs who make regular charitable donations have significantly higher CSR performance than those managed by CEOs who occasionally donate or never donate. To identify causation, we examine changes in firms' CSR performance around exogenous CEO turnover events with a difference-in-difference approach. We find that when a non-routine-donor CEO or non-donor CEO is replaced by a routine donor CEO, the firm's CSR performance improves. Also, using natural disasters as quasi-natural experiments that increase public awareness about CSR, we find firms managed by routine donor CEOs increase their firm's CSR performance more than firms managed by non-routine-donor CEOs after the shocks. Our results are consistent with behavioral consistency theory which predicts that a CEO's personal socially responsible behavior can predict his firm's socially responsible engagement. Overall, we provide important new evidence on why firms engage in CSR and identify a new CEO characteristic that can predict such engagements. In the third essay, we investigate the relationship between the CEO and the CFO focusing on one of the visible cultural attributes, age. Substantial age dissimilarity between the two, giving rise to cognitive conflicts, increases the difficulty of communications and may destroy firm value. We measure this age dissimilarity using the age gap between the CEO and the CFO to investigate its correlation with the firm's financial performance. We find evidence showing that firm performance is negatively correlated with this age gap. As the high-tech industries require more efficient and timely communications, the age gap effects are stronger for those firms. Further, when human capital is of more importance, that is, for younger firms, the age gap effects are also stronger. As an alternative to age-based analysis, we also analyze the effects of a generational gap between the CEO and the CFO. We find that firm value tends to be lower when the generational gap exists between the two.