This article illustrates an incentive-aligning role of debt in the presence of optimal compensation contracts. Owing to information asymmetry, value-maximizing compensation contracts allow managerial rents following high investment outcomes. The manager has an incentive to increase these rents...

Traditional Executive Stock Option plans typically allow fixed numbers of options to vest over a period of several years, independent of stock price performance. Such options may climb deep in-the-money long before the manager is permitted to exercise them, potentially making the manager more...

Benveniste and Wilhelm (1990) address the problem of an Initial Public Offer where the issuer uses the bookbuilding method to elicit information from potentially informed regular investors. Bamp;W contend that regulatory constraints on the ability of underwriters to price discriminate between...

Traditional executive stock option plans allow fixed numbers of options to vest periodically, independent of stock price performance. Because such options may climb deep in-the-money long before the manager can exercise them, they can exacerbate risk aversion in project selection. Making the...

Why is the issuer's reservation price not disclosed in bookbuilding? We analyze the differential effect of reservation price disclosure on the underpricing required to elicit truthful indications of interest from investors. We find that a policy of disclosure would increase proceeds for firms...

We model a competitive industry where managers choose quantities and costs to maximize a combination of firm profits and benefits from expropriation. Expropriation is possible because of corporate governance lsquo;slack' permitted by the government. We show that corporate governance slack...

Many companies are recognizing that the Black-Scholes formula is inappropriate for employee stock options (ESOs) and are moving toward lattice models for accounting or decision-making purposes. In the most influential of these models, the assumption is that employees exercise voluntarily when...

Cross-border mergers allow firms to alter the level of protection they provide to their investors, because target firms usually import the corporate governance system of the acquiring company by law. Therefore, cross-border mergers provide a natural experiment to analyze the effects of changes...

Why is the issuer's reservation price not disclosed in bookbuilding? We analyze the differential effect of reservation price disclosure on the underpricing required to elicit 'truthful' indications of interest from investors. We find that a policy of disclosure would increase proceeds for firms...