stock option repricing and its alternatives an empirical examination in this paper i examine the likelihood of ceo stock option repricing and its alternatives namely option grant stock grant and do nothing multinomial logit results suggest that firms reprice options to increase sensitivity of pay to stock price and to temper down sensitivity of pay to volatility moreover repricing firms are younger and more concentrated in industries where human capital is important finally i find no evidence that internal governance or executive conflicts of interest are relevant in explaining repricing my results indicate that repricing is motivated by incentive alignment and retention and not by agency cost considerations

positioning jibs as an interdisciplinary journal journal of international business studies 2011 42 1 9 doi 10 1057 jibs 2010 50 it is with great honor and pleasure as well as in keen anticipation of what we are confident can be achieved by the journal that we begin this three year term as the new editors of the journal of international business studies we are both long term members of the academy of international business aib and readers of jibs for almost as long as we can remember over the years we have watched the ever more promising development of jibs of which we now enjoy more issues per year and in which the gradual progression in the depth and breadth of its content has laid the foundations for what we hope and believe will be a new phase in the flourishing of the journal in the period that now lies ahead in this respect we must begin by paying tribute to all the editorsin chief of the journal that have preceded us whose conscientious efforts have not gone unrewarded naturally enough we owe a debt of gratitude especially to our two most recent predecessors arie lewin and lorraine eden before arie jibs was the long established leading specialist journal within the field of international business ib studies a partially hidden gem for those of us in the know after arie it was recognized much more widely as a top a journal among scholars of business and management even outside the ib field arie raised the stature of jibs in business schools as a whole an achievement that was crucial not just for the journal but for the continued vitality of our field before lorraine if we are brutally honest jibs had remained a rather shambolic affair in terms of its administrative structure and procedures in fact it is a credit to the earlier editors that they managed to achieve so much with such limited resources and systems of support most of which were concentrated in a single office that used to hold responsibility for everything after lorraine jibs has become an exemplar of efficient organizational systems and well managed and clearly understood procedures for conduct including a pioneering code of ethics we should also acknowledge here with warm appreciation the critical contributions that have been made by the aib executive secretariat and especially by managing editor anne hoekman as well as by david bull and his wonderful staff at palgrave whose degree of commitment to the journal and support for it has been second to none when we look at how radically jibs has been transformed under arie s and lorraine s leadership suffice to say that but for the sea changes which they have brought about we would have had to think very hard before offering our services as editors but with the firm foundation that they have given us and with the resulting opportunities that the journal now has in front of it stepping forward as editors is a decision we have made with ease as well as pride journal of international business studies 2011 42 1 9 2011 academy of international business all rights reserved 0047 2506

effect sizes and the interpretation of research results in international business journal editors and academy presidents are increasingly calling on researchers to evaluate the substantive as opposed to the statistical significance of their results to measure the extent to which these calls have been heeded i aggregated the meta analytically derived effect size estimates obtained from 965 individual samples i then surveyed 204 studies published in the journal of international business studies i found that the average effect size in international business research is small and that most published studies lack the statistical power to detect such effects reliably i also found that many authors confuse statistical with substantive significance when interpreting their research results these practices have likely led to unacceptably high type ii error rates and invalid inferences regarding real world effects by emphasizing p values over their effect size estimates researchers are under selling their results and settling for contributions that are less than what they really have to offer in view of this i offer four recommendations for improving research and reporting practices

recruitment based competition between industries a community ecology because entrepreneurs often must recruit labor in order to launch their ventures the labor market is a potential source of constraint in the entrepreneurial process moreover competition in the labor market likely does not end at the boundaries of the product market as industries overlap in their needs for labor i use an organizational ecology framework to examine how founding rates in an industry vary with the degree of competition with other industries for labor and thereby provides evidence of recruitment based competition between industries in a community ecology the extent of recruitment based overlap between industries is inferred from data on flows of employees within and between industries analyses of founding rates in eighty four industries in denmark over the period 1980 1991 suggest that new firms are less likely to appear in industries that occupy crowded regions of the labor market copyright 2004 oxford university press

psychological factors and stock option exercise we investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50 000 employees at seven corporations controlling for economic factors psychological factors influence exercise consistent with psychological models of beliefs employees exercise in response to stock price trends exercise is positively related to stock returns during the preceding month and negatively related to returns over longer horizons consistent with psychological models of values that include reference points employee exercise activity roughly doubles when the stock price exceeds the maximum price attained during the previous year

employee reload options pricing hedging and optimal exercise reload options call options granting new options on exercise are popularly used in compensation although the compound option feature may seem complicated there is a distribution free dominant policy of exercising reload options whenever they are in the money the optimal policy implies general formulas for numerical valuation simpler formulas for valuation and hedging follow from black scholes assumptions with or without continuous dividends time vesting affects the optimal policy but numerical results indicate that it is nearly optimal to exercise in the money whenever feasible the results suggest that reload options produce similar incentives as employee stock options and share grants the valuation of options in compensation schemes is important for several reasons valuations are needed for preparing accounting statements and tax returns and more generally for understanding what value has been promised to the employees and what residual value remains with the shareholders furthermore understanding the hedge ratios and the overall shape of the valuation function clarifies the employee s risk exposure and incentives this article studies the optimal exercise and valuation of a relatively new but increasingly commonplace type of employee stock option the reload option these options have attracted a fair amount of controversy we believe that in large part this controversy is due to a seemingly complex structure in the statement of financial accounting standards sfas 123 financial accounting standards board 1995 paragraph 186 concludes the board continues to believe that ideally the value of a reload option should be estimated on the grant date taking into account all of its features however at this time it is not feasible to do so on close examination however these options are in fact comparatively simple to analyze and understand moreover under black and scholes 1973 assumptions on the stock price we are able to provide explicit valuation and hedging formulas we hope our analysis helps to demystify reload options and permit a more focused debate

optimal contracts under adverse selection and moral hazard a continuous time approach this article presents a continuous time agency model in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard with a risk averse agent and a risk neutral principal under the model setup we show that the optimal controls are constant over time and thus the optimal menu consists of contracts that are linear in the final outcome we also show that when a moral hazard problem adds to an adverse selection problem the monotonicity condition well known in the pure adverse selection literature needs to be modified to ensure the incentive compatibility for information revelation the model is applied to a few managerial compensation problems involving managerial project selection and capital budgeting decisions we argue that in the third best world the relationship between the volatility of the outcome and the sensitivity of the contract depends on interactions between the managerial cost and the firm s production functions contrary to conventional wisdom sometimes the higher the volatility the higher the sensitivity of the contract the firm receiving good news sometimes chooses safer projects or invests less than it does with bad news we also examine the effects of the observability of the volatility on corporate investment decisions copyright 2005 oxford university press

the repricing of executive stock options abstract we examine a sample of firms that reset the exercise prices on their executive options these repricings follow a period of about one year of poor firm specific performance in which the average firm loses one fourth of its value no other offsetting changes to option terms or compensation are made and many firms reprice more than once without repricing a majority of the options would have been at the money within two years we find that when faced with circumstances in which repricing might be chosen firms with greater agency problems smaller size and insider dominated boards are more likely to reprice

search sorting and urban agglomeration studies have suggested that urban agglomeration enhances productivity by facilitating the firm worker matching process this article develops a model that formalizes this notion and demonstrates that when firm capital and worker skill are complementary in production urban agglomeration will tend to generate more efficient yet segregated matches as a result not only will local market size be positively associated with average productivity it will also generate greater between skill group wage inequality and a higher expected return to skill acquisition recent data from the counties and metropolitan areas of the united states is consistent with each of these implications

auctioning incentive contracts this paper draws a remarkably simple bridge between auction theory and incentive theory it considers the auctioning of an indivisible project among several fi rms the firms have private information about their future cost at th e bidding stage and the selected firm ex post invests in cost reduct ion the authors show that 1 the optimal auction can be implemented by a dominant strategy auction that uses information about both the first bid and the second bid 2 the winner faces a linear incenti ve contract 3 the fixed transfer to the winner decreases with his announced expected cost and increases with the second lowest announce d expected cost and 4 the share of cost overruns borne by the winn er decreases with the winner s announced expected cost copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital evidence from the cities abstract based on recent theoretical developments the argument is made that the average level of human capital is a local public good cities with higher average levels of human capital should therefore have higher wages and higher land rents after conditioning on the characteristics of individual workers and dwellings this prediction is supported by data for standard metropolitan statistical areas smsas in the united states where the smsa average levels of formal education and work experience are used as proxies for the average level of human capital the alternative explanations of omitted smsa variables and self selection are evaluated an estimate of the effect of an additional year of average education on total factor productivity is computed

explaining wage inequality in telecommunications services customer segmentation human resource practices and union decline this study examines factors related to within occupation wage inequality among service and sales workers in the telecommunications industry the author draws on a 1998 survey of a nationally representative sample of 354 service and sales centers in the industry to examine the importance of management practices and union institutions in shaping wage variation the results strongly indicate that business strategies of customer segmentation and human resource practices explain variation in wages over and above that explained by the human capital of the work force in addition despite extensive deregulation and de unionization of the industry the union wage premium is 22

corporate demography and income inequality we examine the relationship between income inequality and corporate demography in regional labor markets and specify two mechanisms through which the number and diversity of employers in a labor market affect wage dispersion vertical differentiation or variation in the ability of organizations of a particular kind to benefit from labor inputs amplifies inequality through quality sorting as the most productive employees in a particular domain pair with the most productive employers increasing horizontal differentiation variation in the kinds of organizations reduces inequality as individuals can more easily find firms interested in their distinctive attributes and talents our analysis of danish census data provides support for each thesis increased numbers of organizations operating within an industry in a region a proxy for vertical differentiation increases wage dispersion in that industry region variation in wages however declines with increased horizontal differentiation among employers th

seeking commonalities or avoiding differences re conceptualizing distance and its effects on internationalization decisions past research established distance s key influence on internationalization however theoretical issues methodological challenges and inconsistent results hinder scholarship on why distance plays such an influential role to address these problems we draw from cognitive research on similarity comparisons to re conceptualize distance and test a model of internationalization decisions analyzing the verbal protocols of executives considering a series of internationalization opportunities we demonstrate that over and above objective distance indicators considerations that reduce distance commonalities and considerations that augment distance differences have distinct effects on decisions of where when and how to internationalize as such our study contributes new insights for understanding the nature and effects of distance across different dimensions of distance and internationalization decisions moreover internationalization theories have come to emphasize different theoretical rationales for explaining the influential role of distance on different decisions by integrating these rationales together with the notion that distance reducing commonalities and distance augmenting differences have distinct implications for internationalization decisions we introduce the notion that it is not only the addition of distance considerations that matters but also the directionality of such changes doing so our study points to new theoretical and methodological insights to help address prior criticisms and advance future research

underwater options and the dynamics of executive pay to performance sensitivities we empirically analyze the dynamics of executives pay to performance sensitivities option pay to performance sensitivities become weaker as options fall underwater often leading to pressures to reprice options or restore pay to performance sensitivity in other ways building a detailed data set on executives portfolios of stock and options we find that the responsiveness of pay to performance sensitivities created by all executive holdings of stock and options to changes in stock price is large the elasticity of pay to performance sensitivities with respect to stock price decreases is about 0 7 and is larger for high option executives and for executives with high percentages of options already underwater the dominant mechanism through which companies offset declines in option pay to performance sensitivities is larger option grants following stock price declines on average these larger grants restore approximately 40 of the stock price induced pay to performance sensitivity declines option repricings are inconsequential in this regard despite the attention they have attracted in looking at positive returns we find the reverse higher returns both directly increase pay to performance sensitivities and lead to larger option grants which raise pay to performance sensitivities further thus option grants to executives tend to be largest following large stock price increases or large stock price decreases

hiring molecules not atoms comobility and wages what role do social connections play in the labor market a vast influential literature has detailed the ways in which ties facilitate the flow of information about job opportunities to workers as well as endorsements or referrals of workers to firms we propose that this role is not constrained to an informational one alone rather relationships between workers can enable a collective job matching process that facilitates the transfer of shared human capital from one organization to another yet comobility has been studied only occasionally and among elite workers in particular industries this study delivers both fieldwork as well as large sample analysis among all nongovernmental workers in denmark finding a 5 5 wage premium for those who move jointly instead of independently both in the full sample as well as when applying strict matching or fixed effects for workers or firms co movers whose skills are related but not identical capture a higher premium and the wage gains associated with comob

contract based motivation for keeping records of a manager s reporting and budgeting history this paper analyzes the role of the agent s bankruptcy constraints in multiperiod principal agent models with asymmetric information conditions are provided under which commitment to a long term contract involving n rounds of investment improves upon repetition of n identical single period contracts further when the agent s reservation wage is sufficiently low the optimal contract is always long term keeping records of a manager s history of reporting activity facilitates contracting since optimal contracts may require a link between past reports and future investments over a duration of two or more periods

explaining interaction effects within and across levels of analysis many manuscripts submitted to the journal of international business studies propose an interaction effect in their models in an effort to explain the complexity and contingency of relationships across borders in this article we provide guidance on how best to explain the interaction effects theoretically within and across levels of analysis first in the case of interactions within the same level of analysis we suggest that authors provide an explanation of the mechanisms that link the main independent variable to the dependent variable and then explain how the interaction variable modifies these mechanisms moreover to ensure that the arguments are theoretically complete we suggest that authors theoretically rule out the potential reverse interaction effect between the main variable and moderating variable second in the case of interactions across levels of analysis we suggest that authors identify the cross level nature of the moderating relationships specify the level of analysis of the main relationship and the nested nature of the cross level influences and theoretically explain these cross level influences additionally we suggest that authors pay particular attention to nesting in order to theoretically rule out reverse interactions

altering the terms of executive stock options abstract we examine the practice of resetting the terms of previously issued executive stock options we identify properties of reset options develop a model for valuing resettable options and characterize the firms that have reset options we find the vast majority of options are reset at the money resulting on average in the strike price dropping 40 our valuation model suggests that resetting has only a small impact on the ex ante value of an option award but the ex post gain can be substantial finally we find resetting has a strong negative relation with firm performance even after correcting for industry performance

labor market advantages of organizational status a study of lateral partner hiring by large u s law firms prior research demonstrates product market advantages of organizational status but largely neglects factor market advantages we propose that status is advantageous in labor markets because individuals generally consider employer status a nonpecuniary employment benefit dyadic analyses of lateral partner hiring by large u s law firms demonstrate two status based advantages in employee hiring and retention first high status firms are more likely than low status ones to hire an employee from a more profitable competitor second high status firms are most likely to lose an employee to a lower status competitor when the competitor is atypically more profitable we discuss implications of these findings for individual and organizational status attainment and for the stability of industry status hierarchies

from the editors common method variance in international business research jibs receives many manuscripts that report findings from analyzing survey data based on same respondent replies this can be problematic since same respondent studies can suffer from common method variance cmv currently authors who submit manuscripts to jibs that appear to suffer from cmv are asked to perform validity checks and resubmit their manuscripts this letter from the editors is designed to outline the current state of best practice for handling cmv in international business research

sticks or carrots optimal ceo compensation when managers are loss averse this paper analyzes optimal executive compensation contracts when managers are loss averse we calibrate a stylized principal agent model to the observed contracts of 595 ceos and show that this model can explain observed option holdings and high base salaries remarkably well for a range of parameterizations we also derive and calibrate the general shape of the optimal contract that is increasing and convex for medium and high outcomes and that drops discontinuously to the lowest possible payout for low outcomes finally we identify the critical features of the loss aversion model that render optimal contracts convex

an analysis of the principal agent problem most analyses of the principal agent problem assume that the principal chooses an incentive scheme to maximize expected utility subject to the agent s utility being at a stationary point an important paper of mirrlees has shown that this approach is generally invalid we present an alternative procedure if the agent s preferences over income lotteries are independent of action we show that the optimal way of implementing an action by the agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem we use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem

risk taking of executives under different incentive contracts experimental evidence classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to counteract excessive risk aversion in agents in a setting where any kind of risk taking is suboptimal for shareholders we show that excessive risk taking may occur for one of two reasons risk preferences or incentives even when compensated through restricted company stock experimental ceos take large amounts of excessive risk this contradicts classical financial theory but can be explained through risk preferences that are not uniform over the probability and outcome spaces and in particular risk seeking for small probability gains and large probability losses compensation through options further increases risk taking as expected we show that this effect is driven mainly by the personal asset position of the experimental ceo thus having deleterious effects on company performance

nontraded asset valuation with portfolio constraints a binomial approach we provide a simple binomial framework to value american style derivatives subject to trading restrictions the optimal investment of liquid wealth is solved simultaneously with the early exercise decision of the nontraded derivative noshort sales constraints on the underlying asset manifest themselves in the form of an implicit dividend yield in the risk neutralized process for the underlying asset one consequence is that american call options may be optimally exercised prior to maturity even when the underlying asset pays no dividends applications to executive stock options eso are presented it is shown that the value of an eso could be substantially lower than that computed using the black scholes model we also analyze nontraded payoffs based on a price that is imperfectly correlated with the price of a traded asset the economics of asset pricing when one or more of the assets in the opportunity set are either subject to trading restrictions or entirely nontraded is a matter of great interest viewed from a practical perspective we have several important examples of such assets that are subject to trading restrictions pensions which represent perhaps the most significant of assets held by individual households are subject to trading restrictions it is typically the case that assets in pensions are not available for immediate consumption borrowing against pension assets is subject to significant direct and indirect costs by way of taxes and early withdrawal penalties human capital is another example housing investment is also illiquid and subject to significant transaction costs together pensions human capital and housing constitute a substantial part of a typical household s assets the significance of such nontraded assets for risk premia has already been noted by bewley 1982 there are other circumstances where lack of unrestricted trading plays an important role executive compensation plans usually take the this article was presented at boston university we would like to thank the editor bernard dumas and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments we also thank nalin kulatilaka and seminar participants for useful suggestions ganlin chang fei guan and carlton osakwe provided valuable research assistance j detemple acknowledges support from the social sciences and humanities research

whom do new firms hire using the matched employer employee data set for denmark and information on the founders of new firms we analyze the hiring choices of all new firms that entered from 2003 to 2010 we develop a theoretical model in which the quality of a firm s employees determines its average cost a firm s productivity is based on its pre entry experience and persistent shocks and over time firms learn about their productivity the model predicts that more productive firms are larger and hire more talented employees which gives rise to various predictions about how pre entry experience firm growth rates and firm size influence the wages firms pay to their early hires we find that beginning with the time of entry larger firms consistently pay higher wages to their new hires these are firms with greater survival prospects at the time of entry based on the pre entry backgrounds of their founders and that grow at greater rates over time both of which are predictive of the wages paid to new hires from the time of entry onward our findings suggest workers are allocated to firms according to their abilities which can give rise to enduring firm capabilities

the other side of the trade off the impact of risk on executive compensation the principal agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance yet the exiting empirical evidence supporting it is quite wea

storytelling the internationalization of the multinational enterprise internationalization deals with expansion across space and time researchers have framed internationalization as market growth and expansion through foreign direct investment fdi we use narrative theory to frame a bigger richer picture using mikhail bakhtin s typology of nine space time conceptions and directed observations of mcdonald s corporation we show how multinational enterprises mnes create narratives of internationalization to mitigate the risks of fdi competing space time conceptions in consumers authors and societies stories interact with managerial narratives to affect international product and task environments we increase awareness of mnes storytelling by offering a typology of stakeholders stories across space and time

you can pay me now and you can pay me later the dynamic response of executive compensation to firm performance empirical studies estimating the impact of firm performance on executive pay have primarily concentrated on the short run response in this study the authors present estimates of the complete dynamic response of ceo pay to firm performance they find that the cumulative response of pay to performance is roughly ten times that of the contemporaneous response a onetime innovation in firm performance typically raises pay over the next 4 5 years and compensation arrangements have shifted toward greater performance sensitivity and longer term pay arrangements over the four decades studied copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

from the editors how to write articles that are relevant to practice although the journal of international business studies is not a practice oriented journal thinking deeper about the practical relevance of our articles can only help enrich them and help decision makers implement better decisions however while many academic articles in social sciences go to great lengths to explain their theoretical and empirical impact in many cases their explanation of practical relevance is a paragraph in the conclusion section with a few cursory ideas that appear to be an afterthought rather than an integral part of the article here we provide suggestions for crafting a practical implications section that is relevant for decision makers

community and capital in entrepreneurship and economic growth we argue that social integration in the sense of within community interconnectedness and venture capital have a complementary relationship in fostering innovation entrepreneurship and economic gr

the exercise and valuation of executive stock options abstract in theory hedging restrictions faced by managers make executive stock options more difficult to value than ordinary options because they imply that exercise policies of managers depend on their preferences and endowments using data on option exercises from 40 firms this paper shows that a simple extension of the ordinary american option model which introduces random exogenous exercise and forfeiture predicts actual exercise times and payoffs just as well as an elaborate utility maximizing model that explicitly accounts for the nontransferability of options the simpler model could therefore be more useful than the preference based model for valuing executive options in practice

the consequences of the fasb s 1998 proposal on accounting for stock option repricing abstract we examine repricing activity surrounding the fasb s 1998 announcement regarding accounting for repriced options we find that repricing increases during and decreases after the 12 day window between the announcement and proposed effective dates consistent with firms timing repricings to avoid recording an expense we find that firms experiencing increasing earnings patterns firms with earnings around zero and growth firms are more likely to reprice in the window but having repriced recently decreases the likelihood of doing so the evidence suggests that firms trade off financial reporting benefits against reputation costs in decisions to time repricings to get favorable accounting treatment

the standard error of regressions statistical significance as used in economics has weak theoretical justification in particular it merges statistical and substantive significance the 182 papers using regression analysis in the american economic review in the 1980s were tested against 19 criteria for the accepted use of statistical significance most some three quarters of the papers did poorly likewise textbooks in econometrics do not distinguish statistical and economic significance statistical significance should not be the focus of empirical economics

from the editors advancing interdisciplinary research in the field of international business prospects issues and challenges doi 1 0 1 057 jibs 2009 4 1 two decades ago jibs published john dunning s presidential address at the aib annual meeting in san diego in which he made a passionate plea for a more interdisciplinary approach to international business ib studies based on a careful analysis of the major economic social political and institutional changes taking place at the time dunning 1989 411 observed

why do firms use incentives that have no incentive effects this paper illustrates why firms might choose to implement stock option plans or other pay instruments that reward luck i consider a model where adjusting compensation contracts is costly and where employees outside opportunities are correlated with their firms performance the model may help to explain the use and recent rise of broad based stock option plans as well as other financial instruments even when these pay plans have no effect on employees on the job behavior the model suggests that agency theory s often overlooked participation constraint may be an important determinant of some common compensation schemes particularly for employees below the highest executive ranks many compensation plans reward or punish employees for factors they cannot control an often discussed example of this phenomenon is executive compensation where stock options are not generally indexed to the overall market however many firms also offer firm wide stock options and profit sharing plans that provide even weaker incentives than executive plans after all most workers can expect to reap trivial personal gain from their contribution to firm value or profits i consider an explanation for this phenomenon in which firms contract with employees as a means of indexing wages to market rates rather than to provide incentives while much of the agency literature has concentrated on inducing optimal effort i consider the importance of the generally overlooked participation constraint i study a model in which employees outside opportunities are correlated with firm profits or stock price and in which both turnover and adjusting the pay scheme parameters are costly given these assumptions the firm may find it most profitable to pay the employee in a way that is correlated with the outside options presented by the outside labor market despite the requisite risk premium rather than pay a fixed wage that insures participation in all states the model derived below starts from the assumption that wage adjustments are costly but that workers are willing to make part of their pay contingent

economic dualism a critical review in this paper we examine the model underlying the dual economy approach to labor market segmentation we provide a specification of the components of the model as well as the linkages between components this construction of the underlying model allows us to evaluate it systematically as a model to consider and to evaluate each component and linkage separately while we conclude that there are several important contributions to retain from the dual approach including the insight that capital structure conditions labor market outcomes we argue that it is inadequate for sustaining theoretical and empirical development as a new starting point for the study of economic and labor market segmentation we suggest a resource perspective which retains insights from the dual approach but avoids its overly restrictive assumptions

growing apart the changing firm size wage premium and its inequality consequences wage inequality in the united states has risen dramatically over the past few decades prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend this study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor market institution that mitigates inequality by compensating their low and middle wage employees with a greater premium than their higher wage counterparts large u s firms reduced overall wage dispersion yet broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms role as an equalizing institution using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find that in 1989 although all private sector workers benefited from a firm size wage premium the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end between 1989 and

marginal contribution reciprocity and equity in segregated groups bounded rationality and self organization in social networks we study the formation of social networks that are based on local interaction and simple rule following agents evaluate the profitability of link formation on the basis of the myerson shapley principle that payoffs come from the marginal contribution they make to coalitions the np hard problem associated with the myerson shapley value is replaced by a boundedly rational spatially myopic process agents consider payoffs from direct links with their neighbours level 1 which can include indirect payoffs from neighbours neighbours level 2 and up to m levels that are far from global agents dynamically break away from the neighbour to whom they make the least marginal contribution computational experiments show that when this self interested process of link formation operates at level 2 neighbourhoods agents self organize into stable and efficient network structures that manifest reciprocity equity and segregation reminiscent of hunter gather groups a large literature alleges that this is incompatible with self interested behaviour and market oriented marginality principle in the allocation of value we conclude that it is not this valuation principle that needs to be altered to obtain segregated social networks as opposed to global components but whether it operates at level 1 or 2 of social neighbourhoods remarkably all m 2 neighbourhood calculations for payoffs leave the efficient network structures identical to the case when m 2

optimal exercise prices for executive stock options although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant date market price in practice virtually all options are granted at the money we offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle by showing that pay to performance incentives for risk averse undiversified executives are typically maximized by setting exercise prices at or near the grant date market price we provide an operationally useful alternative to black scholes 1973 for the purpose of both valuing executive stock options and measuring the incentives created by options our framework has implications not only for exercise price policies but also for indexed options option repricings exchanges of cash for stock based compensation and the design of bonus plans

are ceos really paid like bureaucrats a common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and ceo pay using a new fifteen year panel data set of ceos in the largest publicly traded u s companies we document a strong relationship between firm performance and ceo compensation this relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of ceo holdings of stock and stock options in addition we show that both the level of ceo compensation and the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance have risen dramatically since 1980 largely because of increases in stock option grants

asymmetric sensitivity of ceo cash compensation to stock returns abstract we document that ceo cash compensation is twice as sensitive to negative stock returns as it is to positive stock returns since stock returns include both unrealized gains and unrealized losses we expect cash compensation to be less sensitive to stock returns when returns contain unrealized gains positive returns than when returns contain unrealized losses negative returns this is consistent with boards of directors exercising discretion to reduce costly ex post settling up in cash compensation paid to ceos

from the editors conducting high impact international business research the role of theory this editorial identifies a number of potential theory related weaknesses in manuscripts some more general in nature others specific to international business ib research it provides a brief critique and suggestions on how to overcome common problems in motivating research framing contributions reviewing literature benefiting from the review process and other issues of conceptual development it also addresses questions particularly critical to ib research including multidisciplinarity utilizing international context and enhancing theoretical impact we conclude with specific guidelines on how to emphasize theory thereby enhancing contribution and impact in crafting and revising submissions to jibs

stock based pay in new economy firms abstract ittner lambert and larcker j accounting economics 2003 this issue present compelling evidence that new economy firms rely more on stock based compensation than do old economy firms based on 1998 and 1999 data from a proprietary sample of companies i complement the ill results by analyzing data over a longer time period 1992 2001 and more importantly document the effect of the 2000 market crash on stock based pay in new economy firms finally i offer evidence supporting the conjecture that differences in pay practices between new and old economy firms reflect accounting considerations perceived costs and competitive inertia

on the optimality of resetting executive stock options the practice of resetting strike prices on underwater executive stock options has drawn criticism for weakening managerial incentives our model shows that although the anticipation of resetting can negatively affect initial incentives resetting can still be an important value enhancing aspect of compensation contracts even from an ex ante standpoint in fact we find that some resetting is almost always optimal the relative advantages of resetting diminish with greater ability of managers to influence the resetting process greater relative importance of external factors on stock performance and lower costs of replacing incumbent managers

the migration of technical workers using panel data on the danish population we estimated the revealed preferences of scientists and engineers for the places in which they choose to work our results indicate that these technical workers exhibit substantial sensitivity to differences in wages but that they have even stronger preferences for living close to family and friends the magnitude of these preferences moreover suggests that the greater geographic mobility of scientists and engineers relative to the population as a whole stems from more pronounced variation across regions in the wages that they can expect these results remain robust to estimation on a sample of individuals who must select new places of work for reasons unrelated to their preferences those who had been employed at establishments that discontinued operations

job relocation and the racial gap in unemployment in detroit and chicago 1980 to 1990 the spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities while employment is increasingly located outside of central cities residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity this study 1 constructs detailed geographic measures of changes in employment opportunities 2 estimates a fixed effects model of changes in the unemployment rate over time and 3 accounts for spatial correlation in the error term neighborhood level employment data from 1980 and 1990 are used to measure changes in the distance to jobs from census tracts in the detroit and chicago metropolitan areas in both cities the decentralization of employment and the loss of manufacturing jobs resulted in substantial changes in the spatial distribution of employment the empirical results indicate that a decline in the spatial proximity to employment is associated with an increase in the unemployment rate for blacks

employee stock option exercises an empirical analysis this paper describes the exercise behavior of over 50 000 employees who hold longterm options on employer stock at eight corporations employees typically exercise options years before expiration commonly sacrificing half of the black scholes value exercise is strongly associated with recent stock price movements the market to strike ratio proximity to vesting dates time to maturity volatility and the employee s level within the company these findings have implications for compensation planners the fasb as it develops a new accounting standard for options and financial statement users and preparers who apply and interpret the new fasb standard

from the editors explaining theoretical relationships in international business research focusing on the arrows not the boxes distinctive features of articles accepted by the journal of international business studies are that they are multidisciplinary in scope and interdisciplinary in content and methodology and they make a substantial theoretical contribution to international business studies failure to meet this last requirement is an often cited reason given by reviewers for article rejection sometimes reviewers mean that a manuscript does not conform to the dominant paradigm in that it is not the next logical step in the study of a phenomenon or they mean that there is little if any integration of several theories used to explain a phenomenon however perhaps the most common underlying meaning when reviewers cite lack of a theoretical contribution for rejection is that the nature of the relationships proposed is not well explained while the first two meanings may be influenced by the specific discipline or methodology involved this final one is not in this editorial we provide a set of guidelines that authors can use to ensure that their paper meets the standard of explaining the logic of the relationships they propose

the original management incentive schemes during the 1990s the structure of pay for top corporate executives shifted markedly as the use of stock options greatly expanded by the early 2000s as the dot com boom ended and the nasdaq stock index melted down these modern executive incentive schemes were being sharply questioned on many grounds for encouraging excessive risk taking and a short run orientation for being an overly costly and inefficient method of providing incentives and even for tempting managers of firms like enron worldcom and tyco to commit fraud in order to ensure a high stock price at the time of exercise this article examines executive incentive schemes developed by du pont and general motors in the 1920s the original incentive schemes linking executive compensation to stock prices the author argues that these plans were well designed to pre empt and address many of the criticisms of modern day executive stock option plans

the road taken origins and evolution of employment systems in emerging companies excerpt drawing on a unique archive of qualitative and quantitative data describing 100 bay area high technology firms within their first decade this paper examines the models of employment relations espoused by company founders and bow those models shaped the evolution of human resource management within their organizations information gleaned from interviews suggests that founders and others involved in designing and launching these companies had blueprints for the employment relation that varied along three key dimensions the primary basis of employee attachment and motivation the primary means for controlling and coordinating work and the primary criterion emphasized in selection based on combinations of these three dimensions firms in our sample cluster fall into one of four distinct types which we label the star factory engineering and commitment models multivariate statistical analyses document how the founder s employment model shaped the subsequent adoption and timing of various human resource policies and documents over these companies early histories as well as the speed with which the first full time human resource manager was appointed the findings are strongly suggestive of complementarities and a tendency toward internal consistency among dimensions of human resource management and of strong path dependence in the evolution of employment systems in organizations some implications of these findings for transactions cost perspectives on the employment relationship are discussed

lower salaries and no options on the optimal structure of executive pay we estimate a standard principal agent model with constant relative risk aversion and lognormal stock prices for a sample of 598 us ceos the model is widely used in the compensation literature but it predicts that almost all of the ceos in our sample should hold no stock options instead ceos should have lower base salaries and receive additional shares in their companies for a typical value of relative risk aversion almost half of the ceos in our sample would be required to purchase additional stock in their companies from their private savings the model predicts contracts that would reduce average compensation costs by 20 while providing the same incentives and the same utility to ceos we investigate a number of extensions and modi cations of the standard model but nd none of them to be satisfactory we conclude that the standard principal agent model typically used in the literature cannot rationalize observed contracts one reason may be that executive pay contracts are suboptimal

from a distance and generalizable to up close and grounded reclaiming a place for qualitative methods in international business research journal of international business studies 2011 42 573 581 doi 10 1057 jibs 2011 19 it is exhilarating to write the introduction to this special issue as it presents an important opportunity for qualitative research to reclaim its position as an integral part of international business ib research the field of ib was founded on a rich qualitative research legacy e g bartlett 1979 crozier 1965 fayerweather 1969 johanson vahlne 1977 kindleberger 1956 prahalad 1975 wilkins 1970 1974 over time however such methods have been progressively marginalized in our field as quantitative methods have become the norm this shift in emphasis has mirrored the broader trend toward more positivistic empirical methods in the social sciences the field of ib is multidisciplinary in scope and interdisciplinary in content and methodology statement of jibs editorial policy however as our respective home disciplines came under growing pressure to solidify their legitimacy as scientific endeavors that merit scholarly attention it is not surprising that we began to take on the norms propagated within our own academic communities that typically equated quantitative data with hard science while there are clear merits associated with quantitative methods the multi cultural multi dimensional and dynamic nature of the field of ib lends itself to a broad range of research methodologies qualitative methods being one of them in order to understand the complexities of emergent and evolving phenomena scattered over distance and the differentiated contexts typical to many topics under investigation in ib it is often inappropriate to engage in large scale cross sectional studies or reductionist methods in the absence of well developed theory rather thick description exploratory research and comparative case analysis that focus on inductive theory building and hypotheses generation may be more suitable

aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal incentives we consider the problem of providing incentives over time for an agent with constant absolute risk aversion the optimal compensation scheme is found to be a linear function of a vector of n accounts which count the number of times that each of the n kinds of observable events occurs the number n is independent of the number of time periods so the accounts may entail substantial aggregation in a continuous time version of the problem the agent controls the drift rate of a vector of accounts that is subject to frequent small random fluctuations the solution is as if the problem were the static one in which the agent controls only the mean of a multivariate normal distribution and the principal is constrained to use a linear compensation rule if the principal can observe only coarser linear aggregates such as revenues costs or profits the optimal compensation scheme is then a linear function of those aggregates the combination of exponential utility normal distributions and linear compensation schemes makes computations and comparative statics easy to do as we illustrate we interpret our linearity results as deriving in part from the richness of the agent s strategy space which makes it possible for the agent to undermine and exploit complicated nonlinear functions of the accounting aggregates

the kuznets curve and the great u turn income inequality in u s counties 1970 to 1990 the authors examine the determinants of inequality in the distribution of family income in approximately 3 100 counties of the united states in 1970 1980 and 1990 such a study provides a window on global trends in social inequality during the period which spans the tail end of the kuznets curve and the more recent upswing in income inequality results from random effects regression models that control for unmeasured heterogeneity among states reveal the continued importance of the kuznetsian pattern of declining inequality with economic development a positive effect of urbanization on inequality a declining positive impact of sector dualism an increasing positive effect of educational heterogeneity and a persistent effect of racial dualism several variables associated with the recent upswing in inequality have significant effects female labor force participation negative female headed households positive percent of the population over age 65 changes from positive to negative over the period manufacturing employment negative and unemployment ambiguous they also discuss methods of estimating the gini coefficient for income inequality at the county level and measures of sector farm nonfarm dualism racial black white dualism and educational heterogeneity

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

information based stock trading executive incentives and the principal agent problem we examine the role of information based stock trading in affecting the risk incentive relation by incorporating an endogenous informed trading into an optimal incentive contracting model we analytically show that apart from reducing incentives a greater risk increases the level of information based trading which consequently enhances executive incentives and offsets the negative risk incentive relation we calibrate the model and find that the economic magnitude of this incentive enhancement effect is significant our empirical test using real world executive compensation data lends strong support to the model prediction our results suggest that principals boards of directors should consider underlying stock trading characteristics when structuring executive incentives

introducing convexity into optimal compensation contracts abstract we study when it is appropriate to add a convex component such as stock options to an optimal managerial compensation contract we show that convexity is introduced when managers have moderate levels of relative risk aversion and decreasing absolute risk aversion in addition we study how convexity is affected as the distribution of outcomes becomes more skewed toward low outcomes here we show that while convexity increases when skewness is increased without regard to the effect on mean stock price the opposite effect results when increases in skewness leave the mean stock price unchanged

multilevel models in international business research multiple level or mixed linear modeling mlm can simultaneously test hypotheses at several levels of analysis usually two or three or control for confounding effects at one level while testing hypotheses at others advances in multi level modeling allow increased precision in quantitative international business ib research and open up new methodological and conceptual possibilities however they create new challenges and they are still not frequently used in ib research in this editorial we outline some key methodological issues for the uses of mlm in ib including criteria sample size and measure equivalence issues we then examine promising directions for future multilevel ib research considering comparative opportunities at nation multiple nation cluster and within nation region levels including large multilevel databases we also consider its promise for mne research about semi globalization interorganizational effects across nations clusters within nations and teams and subsidiaries within mnes

from the editors student samples in international business research the jibs statement of editorial policy states that empirical submissions utilizing undergraduate student samples are usually discouraged wording is important here usually does not imply always this statement suggests that while student samples are appropriate in principle undergraduate ones are not except in unusual situations the purpose of this from the editors column is to discuss the pros and cons of student samples in international business ib research are student samples appropriate for developing and testing ib theories when are student samples appropriate and when are they not appropriate is there a difference between undergraduate and graduate samples what are the best practices this editorial is intended to provide ib researchers with guidelines as to when student samples and which types of student samples are appropriate in ib research

industrial shifts skills levels and the labor market for white and black males in this paper we estimate the effects of industrial shifts in the 1970s and 1980s on the wages and employment of black and white males we use micro census data for 52 msa s and estimate effects separately by age and education group the results show that industrial shifts did reduce demand for blacks and for less skilled males in the 1970s and 1980s demand shifts away from manufacturing in particular reduced employment and wages for black and white males while the magnitudes of these effects are fairly small for many groups they can account for one third to one half of the employment decline for less educated young blacks in the 1970s these results imply fairly large effects on the earnings of less skilled males in the 1980s as well authors

ceo incentives and firm size we develop a model that clarifies how to measure ceo incentive strength and how to reconcile the enormous differences in pay sensitivities between executives in large and small firms the crucial parameter is shown to be the elasticity of ceo productivity with respect to firm size we find that ceo marginal products rise significantly with firm size confirming rosen s conjecture that ceos of large firms have a chain letter effect on firm performance and overall ceo incentives are roughly constant or decline slightly with firm size we employ a multitask model to discuss implications for the design of control systems

from the editors endogeneity in international business research this essay builds on the exposition by thomas et al and focuses on analyzing cause and effect in international business research we attempt to explain how endogeneity problems occur and why they are so prevalent in international business research in a non technical fashion we then discuss the importance of explicitly identifying how the chosen research design best approximates a randomized controlled experiment finally we provide some guidelines on achieving this goal and emphasize the practices that seem most relevant to jibs reviewers in evaluating high quality international business research

executive compensation a modern primer this article studies traditional and modern theories of executive compensation bringing them together under a simple unifying framework accessible to the general interest reader we analyze assignment models of the level of pay and static and dynamic moral hazard models of incentives and compare their predictions to empirical findings we make two broad points first traditional theories find it difficult to explain the data suggesting that compensation results from rent extraction by ceos however more modern shareholder value theories that arguably better capture the ceo setting do deliver predictions consistent with observed practices suggesting that these practices need not be inefficient second seemingly innocuous features of the modeling setup often made for tractability or convenience can lead to significant differences in the model s implications and conclusions on the efficiency of observed practices we close by highlighting apparent inefficiencies in executive compensation and additional directions for future research