bank stability and managerial compensation abstract we investigate the relationship between insolvency risk and executive compensation for bhcs over the 1992 2008 period we employ ceo compensation sensitivity to risk vega and pay share inequality between the ceo and other executives as measures of compensation and employ a system model to account for the endogeneity problem between vega and risk five main results are obtained first ceo compensation sensitivity to risk of bhcs has risen in response to deregulation to resemble those of the industrial firms second higher vegas lead to greater bank instability third the association between bank stability and managerial compensation is bi directional higher vegas induce greater risk and vice versa fourth bhcs in the next to the largest size group increase ceo vegas the most and have the strongest potential to create instability fifth increased pay share inequality has effects opposite to those of the increase in vega greater pay share inequality is associated with greater stability

political and legal restraints on ownership and control of public companies abstract law and politics affect the financial structure of the public corporation perhaps as much as economics law restricts financial institutions from holding large equity blocks and from networking the small blocks they do own impetus for these restrictions came from several sources a public spirited belief that financial stability would be fostered by financial fragmentation american federalism each state created its own insular set of financial institutions rivalries between groups of financial institutions and popular mistrust of powerful private financial institutions the stability of many of these rules also derives from the political resistance that one would expect corporate managers and benefited financial institutions to offer to any change

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

exchange and condom use in informal sexual relationships in urban kenya abstract this article investigates whether a market for unsafe sexual activity exists among nonmarital noncommercial sexual relationships in a high hiv aids environment the exchange of money for sex without a condom is well known within commercial sexual partnerships but it is unclear from the previous evidence whether markets can emerge among noncommercial relationships as well i use data on nonmarital sexual partnerships and transfers from kisumu kenya to investigate this question i define and measure transfers as material items given by a male to his female sexual partner including money and nonmonetary items such as gifts meals and rent i find a strong negative relationship between the level of transfers and condom use after controlling for male fixed effects and other important female and partnership characteristics i also find that nonmonetary transfers have the same relationship with condom use as monetary transfers furthermore i test the assumption that adolescent girls are particul

income shocks and gender gaps in education evidence from uganda abstract this paper uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children s enrollment and academic performance conditional on gender i find negative deviations in rainfall from the long term mean to have negative and highly significant effects on female enrollment in primary schools and the effect grows stronger for older girls i find no effect of rainfall variation on the enrollment of boys and young girls moreover i find that when schooling is free of charge and both marginal boys and girls are enrolled a negative income shock has an adverse effect on the test scores of female students while boys are not affected the results imply that households respond to income shocks by varying the amount of schooling and resources provided to girls while boys are to a large extent sheltered a finding consistent with a model where parents values of child labor differ across sexes

a cross country comparison of rural income generating activities summary this paper uses a newly constructed cross country database composed of comparable income aggregates to examine the full range of income generating activities carried out by rural households the analysis paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries on all four continents though less so in the included african countries for most countries the largest share of income stems from off farm activities and the largest share of households has diversified sources of income diversification not specialization is the norm nevertheless agricultural sources of income remain critically important for rural livelihoods in all countries

creative destruction and firm specific performance heterogeneity traditional u s industries with higher firm specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology it more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20 th century we argue that this mechanically reflects a wave of schumpeter s 1912 creative destruction disrupting a wide swath of industries with successful it adopters unpredictably undermining established firms this validates endogenous growth theory models of creative destruction e g aghion and howitt 1992 and suggests intensified creative destruction as explaining findings associating greater firm specific performance variation with higher per capita gdps economy growth rates accounting standards financial system development and property right protection

economic determinants of land invasions this study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict we examine land invasions in brazil using a panel data set with over 50 000 municipality year observations adverse eco nomic shocks instrumented by rainfall cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings this effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems but not by other observable variables in highly unequal municipalities negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality cross sectional estimates using fine within region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict i introduction c onflict over land is endemic to many rural econo mies in environments marked by a highly skewed distribution of property incomplete land and credit markets poorly or unevenly enforced property rights and weak political institutions agents often resort to extralegal means to improve their economic positions the poor frequently invade private properties and occupy them until either forcibly expelled or granted official titles land conflict which is prevalent in many countries such as brazil south africa uganda and venezuela may distort the allocation of resources in the agricultural sector away from productive uses and thereby contribute to the persistence of rural poverty how do economic conditions affect this redistrib utive conflict this paper explores this question using a rich municipal level data set of 5 299 land invasions from 1988 to 2004 in brazil we follow miguel satyanath and sergenti 2004 by using rainfall as a source of exogenous variation to study the relationship between income and conflict and we find that adverse economic shocks cause the rural poor to invade large landholdings this effect exhibits considerable het erogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems in highly unequal municipalities negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality the effect of income shocks is even stronger in highly polarized municipalities as measured by the degree of bimodality in the land distribution cross sectional estimates using fine within region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict we also find that income shocks cause significantly more land invasions in municipalities with a greater proportion of land under fixed rent contracts by contrast we find no evidence of heterogeneity on a range of other political and socioeconomic variables including political competition sharecropping police expenditures and social welfare spending recent microeconometric studies have examined two

misperceiving the beliefs of others how pluralistic ignorance contributes to the persistence of positive security analyst reactions to the adoption of stock repurchase plans we consider how a social psychological bias referred to as pluralistic ignorance occurs among security analysts and how this bias may lead to behavioral conformity and isomorphism in analysts reactions to the adoption of a particular organizational policy namely stock repurchase plans our theory suggests why 1 there may be a systematic tendency for analysts to underestimate the extent to which other analysts share their reservations about repurchase plans i e reservations about whether plans reflect well on the performance prospects of adopting firms such that 2 analysts conform to other analysts and issue more positive earnings forecasts and stock recommendations in response to the adoption of repurchase plans despite having private reservations about whether the plans reflect well on adopting firms we also contend that analysts are less likely to underestimate the extent to which others share their reservations about repurchase plans to the extent that they have frequent communication ties to other analysts whereas prior neoinstitutional research on conformity and isomorphism has primarily adopted a cognitive perspective in which actors conform to the behavior of others based on their understandings of a particular policy or practice i e they take the value of the policy for granted or infer the value of the policy from others prior decisions we develop a social psychological perspective on isomorphism wherein actors imitate others based on their biased perceptions of others beliefs about the policy we also extend perspectives on institutional persistence by explaining why constituents may continue to publicly endorse a policy despite having private reservations about the policy s efficiency benefits

a study of the corporate governance of thrifts we study corporate governance within the thrift industry during a period of industry distress and legally mandated regulatory vigilance we find evidence consistent with the office of thrift supervision displacing the disciplinary role of takeovers in the market for thrift control poorer prior thrift performance is associated with a greater likelihood of censure while better prior performance is associated with a greater likelihood of acquisition for thrifts that are not censured or acquired there is no relationship between current performance and managerial turnover replacement due to retirement rather than board discipline explains most of these turnovers this result is consistent with the notion that regulation may deter board disciplinary behavior also suggested by kole and lehr journal of financial economics 52 1999 79

a transition cost rationale for transition of the firm within the family this paper is about the transition of ownership of shares in small and medium sized enterprises smes within the family i e from parents to children in spite of the fact that such successions are rather prevalent among smes there are no explanations in the literature as to why transitions are preferred to outright sale in this paper we assume that the decisive factor in the choice of succession mode is the desire for efficiency expressed as the highest possible firm value a firm should stay in the family if this is the most profitable transition alternative one reason for intergenerational succession to be the most profitable alternative is knowledge idiosyncrasy however the benefits of knowledge idiosyncrasy cannot be reaped without an institutional framework that constrains human activities in a proper way a part of an institutional framework are the laws that act as constraints in successions do these laws foster or prevent efficient transition of family firms this question is addressed in a study of the swedish inheritance and inheritance tax laws in the light of the policy recommendations on succession made by the european commission

compensating outside directors with stock the impact on non primary stakeholders two obvious trends in corporate governance include broadening board accountability beyond shareholders interests and paying outside directors with equity compensation stock and stock options by integrating common agency and instrumental stakeholder theories we examine the effect of stock compensation on secondary stakeholders and a firm s participation in social issues two areas where interests are less aligned with shareholder value consistent with our predictions we found that while stock compensation may be an effective way to align directors goals to those of shareholders it has adverse effects on important non shareholder constituencies in the company s operating environment

integrating behavioral choice into epidemiological models of aids increased hiv risk creates incentives for people with low sexual activity to reduce their activity but may make high activity people fatalistic leading them to reduce their activity only slightly or actually increase it if high activity people reduce their activity by a smaller proportion than low activity people the composition of the pool of available partners will worsen creating positive feedbacks and possibly multiple steady states early public health efforts may allow societies to reach more favorable steady states excerpt

testing theories of consumption behavior using information on aggregate shocks income seasonality and rainfall in rural india we develop an integrated framework for testing theories of consumption behavior by examining how agricultural households in rural india respond to anticipated and unanticipated seasonal income fluctuations using information on village level rainfall surprises we estimate idiosyncratic unanticipated income shocks by allowing weather risk to impact households differently depending on observable characteristics in applying our methodology to unique panel data on consumption debt and intrahousehold gift exchanges we address a number of shortcomings in previous tests of theories of consumption behavior yet we find no evidence against the hypothesis that households smooth idiosyncratic fluctuations in their income our approach also uncovers several interesting features of rural credit and insurance markets

climate shocks and exports this paper uses international trade data to examine the effects of climate shocks on economic activity we examine panel models relating the annual growth rate of a country s exports in a particular product category to the country s weather in that year we find that a poor country being 1 degree celsius warmer in a given year reduces the growth rate of that country s exports by between 2 0 and 5 7 percentage points with no detectable effects in rich countries we find negative effects of temperature on exports of both agricultural products and light manufacturing products with little apparent effects on heavy industry or raw materials the results confirm large negative effects of temperature on poor countries economies and suggest that temperature affects a much wider range of economic activity than conventionally thought this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

negotiated block trades and corporate control we identify negotiated trades of large percentage blocks of stock as corporate control transactions when a block trades and the firm is not fully acquired cumulative abnormal returns average 5 6 and 33 of the chief executives are replaced within a year stock price increases are larger when control passes to the new blockholder when management does not resist the blockholder s effort to influence corporate policy and when the block purchaser eventually fully acquires the firm these findings suggest that the specific skills and expertise of blockholders and not just the concentration of ownership are important determinants of firm value we examine 106 negotiated trades of at least 5 of the common stock of new york stock exchange nyse and american stock exchange amex listed corporations our primary objective is to assess the impact of these transactions on the firms whose shares are traded we also investigate the importance of active block investor s specific managerial expertise and incentives for firm value the emerging literature on concentrated ownership focuses on how the level of ownership affects a blockholder s incentives to undertake a variety of corporate decisions although it has been recognized that a blockholder s identity also can be important less attention has been paid to this issue several recent studies however provide evidence that blockholders incentives and expertise are not homogeneous for example holderness and sheehan 1985 find that the stock market reacts more favorably to initial block accumulations by six controversial investors who are often portrayed in the press as raiders than to initial accumulations by a random sample of investors morck shleifer and vishny 1988 find that firm value tends to be lower when the firm is run by a member of the founder s family than when it is run by an officer unrelated to the founder brickley lease and smith 1988 document that institutional blockholders are less willing to vote against management on antitakeover amendments when they are likely to have business dealings with the firm when a block trades the concentration of ownership typically does not change but the blockholder s identity does

stock splits and stock dividends why who and when this study investigates empirically why firms split their stock or distribute stock dividends and why the market reacts favorably to these distributions the findings suggest that stock splits are mainly aimed at restoring stock prices to a normal range some support can also be found for the oft mentioned signalling motive of stock splits stock dividends are altogether different from stock splits and they appear to be a decreasing phenomenon the clue to stock dividend distributions may lie in their perceived substitution for relatively low cash dividends neither stock splits nor stock dividends are recent phenomena the latter dates back to the elizabethan age among the first to declare such dividends was the east india company which while enjoying great prosperity declared in 1682 a stock dividend of one hundred percent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stock dividends were quite frequently distributed by british companies in the united states an early and frequently discussed stock dividend distribution was that of the new york central railroad just prior to its union with the hudson river railroad in 1869 surprisingly stock dividends were quite popular in the u s despite their being subject to federal income tax thus for example during the seven years prior to 1922 the year in which the supreme court exempted the recipients of stock dividends from taxes the ratio of stock dividends to all dividend distributions was 14 5 percent this ratio increased to a staggering forty seven percent during the seven years succeeding the supreme court decision during 1936 to 1937 some american companies distributed stock dividends to avoid the undistributed profit tax

rational herding in financial economics abstract this paper briefly describes recent papers on the economics of rational herding in financial markets some models can predict perfect herding in which rational agents all act alike without any countervailing force such herding typically arises either from direct payoff externalities negative externalities in bank runs positive externalities in the generation of trading liquidity or in information acquisition principal agent problems based on managerial desire to protect or signal reputation or informational learning cascades the paper also provides a few pointers to related literature and suggests issues to be addressed in future research

sexually transmitted infections sexual behavior and the hiv aids epidemic forty million people are infected with hiv worldwide twenty five million of them are in sub saharan africa this paper addresses the question of why africa has been so heavily affected by hiv and what explains the variation within africa i present a model that decomposes epidemic level into differences in sexual behavior and differences in viral transmission rates i argue using evidence drawn from the existing medical literature that africa has very high hiv transmission rates likely due to high rates of other untreated sexually transmitted infections while transmission rates in the united states are low the difference in transmission rates is large enough to explain the observed difference in prevalence between the united states and sub saharan africa the model also provides a good fit to cross country data within africa and suggests that in contrast to the intracontinental results differences within that continent can be attributed to differences in sexual behavior and epidemic timing the results suggest that cost effective policy interventions would focus on decreasing transmission rates within africa possibly by treating other untreated sexually transmitted infections authors

catering through nominal share prices we propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices the theory predicts that when investors place higher valuations on low price firms managers respond by supplying shares at lower price levels and vice versa we confirm these predictions in time series and firm level data using several measures of time varying catering incentives more generally the results provide unusually clean evidence that catering influences corporate decisions because the process of targeting nominal share prices is not well explained by alternative theories in frictionless and efficient stock markets there is no optimal nominal pershare stock price a firm s board of directors may choose to split to manage the nominal share price and number of shares outstanding but cannot change its overall market value through these means yet boards typically do manage their firms nominal share price rather than watch it passively drift with returns theories offered to explain share price management include arguments that trading costs depend on nominal prices dolley 1933 angel 1997 that splits signal inside information brennan and copeland 1988 asquith healy and palepu 1989 and ikenberry rankine and stice 1996 or that prices in certain ranges simply constitute a market norm from which there is little gain to deviating rozeff 1998 weld et al 2009 in this paper we propose a catering theory of nominal share prices we define catering as the managerial behavior of increasing the supply of a characteristic that investors appear to be paying a premium for even though that characteristic does not increase fundamental value the catering theory of nominal share prices thus posits that the supply of securities of different price ranges is partly a response to investor demand for securities of different price ranges managers increase the supply of low priced securities

a theory of prostitution prostitution is low skill labor intensive female and well paid this paper proposes a marriage market explanation to this puzzle if a prostitute compromises her marriage market prospects she will have to be compensated for forgone marriage market opportunities we discuss the link between poverty and prostitution and show that prostitution may decrease with male income if wives and prostitutes are drawn from the same pool of women we point to the role of male sex ratios and males in transit in sustaining high levels of prostitution and we discuss possible reasons for its low reputation and implications for marriage patterns

toehold acquisitions shareholder wealth and the market for corporate control this study examines the valuation consequences of control related outcomes that fol low toehold acquisitions we find evidence that toehold acquisitions facilitate valueenhancing control transfers the types of control transfers not only include takeovers but also internal mechanisms such as proxy fights and management turnovers we find that toehold targets experiencing such control transfers exhibit an abnormal increase in share value while those not experiencing such control transfers exhibit an abnormal de crease in share value the results suggest that the positive valuation effect associated with toehold acquisitions reflects the expected benefits of subsequent control transfers

do voters demand responsive governments evidence from indian disaster relief abstract using rainfall public relief and election data from india we examine how governments respond to adverse shocks and how voters react to these responses the data show that voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control however fewer voters punish the ruling party when its government responds vigorously to the crisis indicating that voters reward the government for responding to disasters we also find evidence suggesting that voters only respond to rainfall and government relief efforts during the year immediately preceding the election in accordance with these electoral incentives governments appear to be more generous with disaster relief in election years these results describe how failures in electoral accountability can lead to suboptimal policy outcomes

on the measurement of tobin s q abstract we examine the methods commonly employed to estimate tobin s q ratios and find them to be flawed in design and arbitrary in implementation we propose an alternative procedure which is both simpler and more accurate the key to the procedure is an improved measure of fixed asset replacement costs through the proper identification of the vintages of fixed assets that are in place for a firm application of this procedure to a large sample of nonfinancial corporations indicates that existing methods generally produce downward biased measures of q and can result in errors in the ordering of firms by their q s

is the allocation of resources within the household efficient new evidence from a randomized experiment i study whether households make pareto efficient intrahousehold resource allocation decisions combining randomized variation in women s income generated by the evaluation of the mexican progresa program with variation attributable to localized rainfall shocks as distribution factors in the collective model i find evidence favoring pareto optimality more specifically female specific income changes have positive effects on children s goods expenditures whereas changes due to rainfall shocks have a smaller influence on household public goods expenditures the evidence is consistent with female partners having greater sensitivity to own income changes and norms that oblige women to devote their earnings to meet collective consumption needs

an instrumental variables approach to estimating tax revenue elasticities evidence from sub saharan africa this paper exploits the significant response of real gdp growth of sub saharan african countries to exogenous international commodity price and rainfall shocks to construct instrumental variables estimates of the tax revenue elasticity iv estimates yield that a 1 increase in gdp increases tax revenues by up to 2 5

personal versus market logics of control a historically contingent theory of the risk of acquisition this paper develops and tests a theory of the historical contingency of the risk of acquisition using data from the higher education publishing market from 1958 1990 interviews and historical analyses are combined to identify two forms of capitalism personal and market and in particular to publishing to identify the institutional logics identified with each form of capitalism an editorial and a market logic hazard rate models are used to test for differences in the effects of these two logics on the organization and market determinants of acquisition publishers with relational network forms of organization in production and distribution were at a higher risk of acquisition in the market period but not in the editorial period competition in the product market increased the risk of acquisition in the market period but not the editorial period the covariates explaining the risk of acquisition change as a consequence of the evolution of capitalism and as a result of a firm s strategic and structural conformity with the institutional logic of the prevailing form of capitalism

income shocks and hiv in africa we examine how variation in local economic conditions has shaped the aids epidemic in africa using data from over 200 000 individuals across 19 countries we match biomarker data on individuals serostatus to information on local rainfall shocks a large source of income variation for rural households we estimate infection rates in hiv endemic rural areas increase by 11 for every recent drought an effect that is statistically and economically significant income shocks explain up to 20 of variation in hiv prevalence across african countries suggesting existing approaches to hiv prevention could be bolstered by helping households manage income risk better the relationship between income and health has long been of interest to economists and a lengthy literature documents strong linkages between economic conditions and many important health outcomes currie 2009 there has been much less progress however in understanding the economic foundations of the hiv aids epidemic one of the most important global health challenges such an understanding might yield particular dividends in sub saharan africa ssa where over a million people continue to become newly infected with the disease each year unaids 2010 in this article we explore the role of negative income shocks in shaping the

voting power in the proxy process abstract the likelihood that a firm will enact a management sponsored antitakeover charter amendment depends on ownership structure this implies that the adoption of antitakeover amendments may be anticipated then announcement returns provide a biased estimate of wealth effects an estimator that corrects for the bias induced by anticipation indicates that the enactment of an antitakeover amendment is associated with a statistically significant decrease in shareholder wealth the voting power of employee stock ownership plans and the chief executive officer plays a prominent role in determining whether a firm will adopt this type of takeover defense

competition and bias we attempt to measure the effect of competition on bias in the context of analyst earnings forecasts which are known to be excessively optimistic because of conflicts of interest our natural experiment for competition is mergers of brokerage houses which result in the firing of analysts because of redundancy e g one of the two oil stock analysts is let go and other reasons such as culture clash we use this decrease in analyst coverage for stocks covered by both merging houses before the merger the treatment sample to measure the causal effect of competition on bias we find that the treatment sample simultaneously experiences a decrease in analyst coverage and an increase in optimism bias the year after the merger relative to a control group of stocks consistent with competition reducing bias the implied economic effect from our natural experiment is significantly larger than estimates from ols regressions that do not correct for the endogeneity of coverage this effect is much more significant for stocks with little initial analyst coverage or competition

incentives and compensation schemes an experimental study when the performances of agents are correlated because of a common random component contracts that use information on both the relative and absolute performances of agents theoretically outperform rank order tournaments and piece rate schemes although the theoretical advantage of such contracts has long been noticed in the literature the empirical papers that study this question have produced mixed results using a controlled laboratory experiment we shed light on the performance of these contracts we focus on the simplest version of such a contract the relative piece rate rpr and compare its performance with that of the tournament and piece rate schemes we find that when the rprs are imposed on the agents they exert higher effort levels and give the principal weakly higher profits than the tournament and piece rate contracts second we find that agents have little aversion to self select into the rpr scheme when other alternatives are available in our paper we fix the environment agents face and vary only their wage scheme our results support the theoretical predictions and suggest that principals can benefit from using rpr schemes in places where the piece rate and tournament contracts would otherwise be used

does the japanese governance system enhance shareholder wealth evidence from the stock price effects of top management turnover this article examines the stock price effects of top management turnover announcements for 432 japanese corporations from 1985 to 1990 we find that these announcements are associated with significantly positive abnormal returns the returns are greater when turnover is forced than when turnover represents normal succession the stock price effects are also significantly positive when turnover is forced and the successor is appointed from outside the firm we find that large shareholders play an important role during outside succession this evidence suggests that the disciplinary decisions of japanese governance mechanisms are consistent with shareholder wealth maximization article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the determinants of failed takeovers in the banking sector deal or country characteristics abstract the consolidation process which characterized the banking industry in the last decades has been widely analyzed but very few studies have investigated the reasons which bring a number of announced deals to failure we fill this gap in the literature analyzing the characteristics of failed m a operations in a large sample including all the major domestic and cross border deals in the banking sector announced worldwide between 1992 and 2010 the results show that the most important factors which determine the failure of an announced operation are deal specific characteristics in particular the hostility of the bidder and the presence of multiple potential acquirers moreover lengthier negotiations have a lower probability of success contrary to expectations cross border operations are more likely to be successfully completed than domestic ones

bringing institutions into performance persistence research exploring the impact of product financial and labor market institutions this study challenges the implicit assumption of homogeneity in national institutional environments made in past studies of firm performance persistence we propose that home country institutions matter we focus on the impact of formal institutions in the product financial and labor markets arguing that they affect the size of pools of exchange partners and the types of exchanges allowed and condoned ultimately these restrictions affect competitive intensity among firms and firm performance persistence using data for over 10 000 firms from 33 countries over a 10 year time frame we show that antitrust law strength a product market institution designed to prevent collusion among firms is associated with decreases in performance persistence unskilled labor market flexibility a labor market institution that reduces legal constraints imposed on residual claimants managers and owners to take necessary actions to maintain or enhance profitability is associated with increases in performance persistence product liability law effectiveness another product market institution and corporate control market development a financial market institution are positively associated with performance persistence only in the case of mnes the two remaining financial and labor market institutions public equity market development respectively skilled labor market availability have a positive respectively negative impact for domestic firms only

conglomerate mergers as defense against the risk of relative price variability this paper studies the effects of the risk of relative price variability on the optimal structure of a firm s cash flows with an application of portfolio theory it is suggested that when relative price risk is greater it is optimal for the management to diversify at the margin and emphasize economies of scale or scope when the risk is smaller conglomerate mergers should therefore be positively associated with relative price risk given the variables affecting mergers as a whole empirical evidence is found to lend support to the theory the inflation rate explains conglomerate mergers even better which suggests that relative price risk may constitute another real resource cost of inflation

the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle time trend or speculative episodes campbell lettau malkiel and xu 2001 document a positive trend in idiosyncratic volatility during the 1962 1997 period we show that by 2003 volatility falls back to pre 1990s levels furthermore we show that the increase and subsequent reversal is concentrated among firms with low stock prices and high retail ownership this evidence suggests that the increase in idiosyncratic volatility through the 1990s was not a time trend but rather an episodic phenomenon at least partially associated with retail investors results from cross sectional regressions conditional trend estimation stock split events and attention grabbing events are consistent with a retail trading effect the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please email journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

idiosyncratic return volatility cash flows and product market competition over the past 40 years the volatility of the average stock return has drastically outpaced total market volatility thus idiosyncratic return volatility has dramatically increased we estimate this increase to be 6 per year consistent with an efficient market this result is mirrored by an increase in the idiosyncratic volatility of fundamental cash flows we argue that these findings are attributable to the more intense economy wide competition various cross sectional and time series tests support this idea economic competitiveness facilitates reinterpretation of the results from the cross country r2 literature as well as the us idiosyncratic risk literature jel g12 g14

poverty and witch killing many observers have noted that poverty and violence go hand in hand there is a strong negative relationship between economic growth and crime across countries as well as across districts in india and a link between low income and the occurrence of civil war 1 yet existing studies are typically unable to resolve the key econometric identification issues of omitted variable bias and endogeneity to illustrate the unobserved quality of local government institutions may affect both income growth and crime rates and poverty could lead to violence if desperate people with nothing to lose commit more crimes but violence itself may in turn affect economic productivity this paper uses local rainfall variation to identify the impact of income shocks on murder in a rural tanzanian district 2 extreme rainfall resulting in drought or floods is exogenous and is associated with poor harvests and near famine conditions in the region and a large increase in the murder of witches there are twice as many witch murders in years of extreme rainfall as in other years the victims are nearly all elderly women typically killed by relatives these econometric results across 11 years in 67 villages provide novel evidence on the role of income shocks in causing violent crime and religious violence in particular and also provide insights into witchcraft an important social phenomenon in africa rarely studied by economists the view that economic conditions are a driving force behind witch murders is bolstered by the fact that most witch killing in tanzania takes place in poor rural areas largely dependent on rain fed agriculture and that most victims in our sample are from poor households however it is difficult to definitively disentangle this income shock theory from alternative socio cultural explanations the concentration of tanzanian witch murders in a region dominated by one particular ethnic group the sukuma and the especially high number of witch murders in villages where indigenous religious beliefs are strong both point to the important role of non economic factors economic theories and cultural theories are perhaps best viewed as complements the empirical findings demonstrate the power of economics to rationalize a phenomenon that has previously been understood almost solely through a socio cultural lens 3

on the structure of take over models and insider outsider conflicts in negotiated take overs abstract we model a takeover game where the players can bid or bargain without the traditional exogenous constraints on the order length and number of alternating stages in our european setting dominant shareholders can appoint and dismiss management implying that we have an insider outsider conflict rather than a management shareholder agency problem and that the distribution of sizeable private benefits is a crucial issue the bargaining solution determines the price even if no explicit negotiations are observed while bargaining strength and scope for exclusion determine the type of takeover pre negotiated or not discriminatory or not

choosing the precision of performance metrics there is a standard trade off in compensation contracts between the provision of incentives and insurance we hypothesize that this trade off influences the precision with which firm performance is measured we find that firm outcomes are measured less precisely when chance plays a large role in these outcomes further this precision is determined through the choice of shares outstanding this has several novel implications nominal stock prices can remain constant over time and firms with unpredictable cash flows should have more shares and lower stock price levels all else equal we find evidence consistent with these implications

capital labor and the firm a study of german codetermination under the german corporate governance system of codetermination employees are legally allocated control rights over corporate assets through seats on the supervisory board that is the board of nonexecutive directors the supervisory board oversees the management board the board of executive directors approves or rejects its decisions and appoints its members and sets their salaries we empirically investigate the implications of this sort of labor participation in corporate decision making we find that companies with equal representation of employees and shareholders on the supervisory board trade at a 31 stock market discount as compared with companies where employee representatives fill only one third of the supervisory board seats we show that under equal representation management board compensation provides incentives that are not conducive to furthering shareholders interests possibly because labor maximizes a different objective function than shareholders we document that under equal representation companies have longer payrolls than their one third representation peers have finally we provide evidence that shareholders respond to the allocation of control rights to labor by linking supervisory board compensation to firm performance and by leveraging up the firm jel g32 g34

discouraging rivals managerial rent seeking and economic inefficiencies we argue here for a broader view of the biases in managers decisions in general managerial rent seeking affects not only the level of investment but also the form our basic hypothesis is simple given the now well established scope for managerial discretion managers have an incentive to exercise that discretion to enhance their income any managerial contract is subject to renegotiation and a manager s pay is the outcome of an often bewildering bargaining process between management the board of directors and rival management teams or takeover artists this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

strategic orientations incentive plan adoptions and firm performance evidence from electric utility firms this study examines the performance implications of the fit between strategic orientations and incentive plan characteristics research hypotheses are based on a framework that draws upon managerial discretion and agency theories to identify the links between firm strategy managerial motivation and control managerial risk bearing and incentive plan characteristics a pooled cross sectional time series research design is used to test hypotheses in a sample of 50 electric utility firms consistent with theory results indicate that annual bonus plans that use cash incentives and accounting measures of performance lead to better performance among firms with defender strategic orientations in contrast firms with prospector strategic orientations realize performance benefits when they adopt stock based incentive plans and use market measures to evaluate managerial performance 1997 john wiley sons ltd

price based return comovement abstract similarly priced stocks move together stocks that undergo splits experience an increase in comovement with low priced stocks and a decrease in their comovement with high priced stocks price based comovement is not explained by economic fundamentals firm size or changes in liquidity or information diffusion the shift in comovement following splits is greater for large stocks high priced stocks and when investor sentiment is high in the full cross section price based portfolios explain variation in stock level returns after controlling for movements in the market and industry portfolios as well as portfolios based on size book to market transaction costs and return momentum the results suggest that investors categorize stocks based on price

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

do investors value smooth performance abstract this paper presents empirical evidence that cash flow volatility is negatively valued by investors the magnitude of the effect is substantial with a 1 increase in cash flow volatility resulting in approximately a 0 15 decrease in firm value we show that this increase however is not associated with earnings smoothing resulting from managers accrual estimates our results are consistent with a preference by the market for less volatile cash flows and suggest that managers efforts to produce smooth financial statements add value but only via the cash component of earnings

the nominal share price puzzle the average nominal share prices of common stocks traded on the new york stock exchange have remained constant at approximately 35 per share since the great depression as a result of stock splits it is surprising that u s firms actively maintained constant nominal prices for their shares while general prices in the economy went up more than tenfold this is especially puzzling given that commissions paid by investors on trading ten 35 shares are about ten times those paid on a single 350 share we review potential explanations including signaling and optimal trading ranges and find that none of the existing theories are able to explain the observed constant nominal prices we suggest that the evidence is consistent with the idea that customs and norms can explain the nominal price puzzle

the hidden costs of political instability evidence from kenya s 2007 election crisis abstract this paper studies the microeconomic impacts of the political crisis and civil conflict that immediately followed the december 2007 presidential election in kenya income expenditures and consumption dramatically declined for a broad segment of the rural population for the duration of the conflict to make up for the income shortfall women who supply transactional sex engaged in higher risk sex both during and after the crisis while this particular crisis was likely too short for these behavioral responses to seriously increase the risk of hiv or other stis for these women such responses could have long term repercussions for health in countries with longer or more frequent crises overall our results suggest that social unrest can be an important channel through which political instability can affect long term outcomes such as health

on the timing of marriage cattle and weather shocks abstractin this paper we focus on the timing of marriage of women whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments these payments concern transfers from the family of the groom to the bride s family unmarried daughters could therefore be considered part of the asset portfolio of the household that at times of need can be cashed we investigate both theoretically and empirically to what extent the timing of marriage of a daughter is affected by the economic conditions of the household from which she originates we distinguish household specific wealth levels and two types of shocks correlated weather shocks and idiosyncratic wealth shocks we estimate a duration model using a unique panel survey of zimbabwean smallholder farmers the estimation results support the hypothesis that the timing of marriage is affected by household characteristics girls from households that experienced a negative idiosyncratic wealth shock are more likely to marry

selling labor low wage responses to productivity shocks in developing countries productivity risk is pervasive in underdeveloped countries this paper highlights a way in which underdevelopment exacerbates productivity risk productivity shocks cause larger changes in the wage when workers are poorer less able to migrate and more credit constrained because of such workers inelastic labor supply this equilibrium wage effect hurts workers in contrast it acts as insurance for landowners agricultural wage data for 257 districts in india for 1956 87 are used to test the predictions with rainfall as an instrument for agricultural productivity in districts with fewer banks or higher migration costs the wage is much more responsive to fluctuations in productivity

inside the family firm the role of families in succession decisions and performance this paper uses a unique dataset from denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance we focus on the decision to appoint either a family or an external chief executive officer ceo the paper uses variation in ceo succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing ceo s first born child this is a plausible instrumental variable iv as male firstchild firms are more likely to pass on control to a family ceo relative to female first child firms but the gender of a first child is unlikely to affect firms outcomes we find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around ceo transitions our iv estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares furthermore we show that family ceo underperformance is particularly large for firms in high growth industries and for relatively large firms overall the empirical results demonstrate that professional non family ceos provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head

why hang on to losers divestitures and takeovers we study the divestiture decisions of managers who care about their reputations managers divestiture and investment decisions are publicly observable but managers privately observe signals with respect to the future payoff distribution of investments they have initiated we establish that in equilibrium there is too little divestiture these inefficiencies create the opportunity for wealth enhancing divestiture motivated takeovers a key result is that only managers of targets with middle of the road asset specificity should consider the takeover threat credible these findings suggest that uniqueness of assets is an important determinant of both agency costs and takeover activity our analysis leads to several empirical predictions overwhelming empirical evidence has documented large gains in shareholder wealth that arise from takeovers jarrell brickley and netter 1988 and jensen and ruback 1983 the source of these gains has remained elusive however although takeovers are followed by some infusion of new managerial talent we have not witnessed the kind of profound post takeover restructuring of the productive activities of target firms that would readily justify the documented wealth gains a commonly observed post takeover initiative is divestiture of some of the target s lines of business bhide 1989 and bhagat shleifer and vishny 1990 what is puzzling is that if the gains from takeovers stem from the anticipation of such divestitures then why were these divestitures not undertaken by the target firm s management in the first place the purpose of this paper is to provide a possible answer to this question our focus is on the divergence in incentives between managers and shareholders with respect to divestitures of ongoing projects we show that managers might rationally decide to hang on to projects that should be divested in

the impact of gender on voluntary and involuntary executive departure we examine the frequency and conditions of executive departure from s p 1500 firms based upon published news reports we find that female executives are more likely than male executives to depart their positions voluntarily and involuntarily in the presence of controls for firm performance firm governance and human capital we also find that women are less likely than men to depart voluntarily as firm size increases or board size decreases but more likely to be dismissed as the board becomes more male dominated jel g30 g32 g34 j44

smoothing income in anticipation of future earnings abstract recent theory argues that concern about job security creates an incentive for managers to smooth earnings in consideration of both current and future relative performance we find support for this theory our evidence suggests that when current earnings are poor and expected future earnings are good managers borrow earnings from the future for use in the current period conversely when current earnings are good and expected future earnings are poor managers save current earnings for possible use in the future however sensitivity analysis indicates that we cannot rule out selection bias as a potential alternative explanation for our findings

alternative mechanisms for corporate control we examine performance and management characteristics of fortune 500 firms experiencing one of three types of control change internally precipitated management turnover hostile takeover and friendly takeover we find that firms experiencing internally precipitated management turnover perform poorly relative to other firms in their industries but are not concentrated in poorly performing industries in contrast targets of hostile takeovers are concentrated in troubled industries there is also weaker evidence that hostile takeover targets underperform their industry peers we interpret this evidence as consistent with the idea that the board of directors is capable of firing managers whose leadership leads to poor performance relative to industry but that an external challenge in the form of a hostile takeover is often required when the whole industry is in decline the evidence also indicates that firms run by a member of the founding family are less likely to experience either internally precipitated top management turnover or a hostile takeover on the other hand firms whose top management team is dominated by a single relatively young top executive while lacking in internal discipline are more likely to experience a hostile takeover this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

ceo turnover and volatility under long term employment contracts we study the role of the contractual time horizon of chief executive officers ceos for ceo turnover and corporate policies using hand collected data on 3 954 fixed term ceo contracts we show that remaining time under contract predicts ceo turnover when contracts are close to expiration turnover is more likely and is more sensitive to performance we also show a positive within ceo relation between remaining time under contract and firm risk our results are similar across short and long contracts and are driven neither by firm or ceo survival nor technological cycles they are consistent with incentives to take long term projects with interim volatility