Managers have great discretion in determining management forecast characteristics, but little is known about how managerial incentives affect these characteristics. In this paper, we examine whether managers strategically choose the precision of their earnings forecasts for self-serving...

Managers have great discretion in determining forecast characteristics, but little is known about how managerial incentives affect these characteristics. This paper examines whether managers strategically choose forecast precision for self-serving purposes. Building on the prior finding that the...

We develop a continuous-time real options pricing model to study managers’incentives to cheat in the presence of equity-based compensation policies.We show that managers’ incentives to cheat are strongly influenced by theefficiency of the justice. Our model’s main result is that managers...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a "representative" Swiss executive and extend the certainty-equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to assess...

This paper studies state-contingent debt as an alternative refinancing instrument for advanced economies. In times of high sovereign indebtedness, increasing yields impose eminent debt roll-over risks. We analyze the welfare implications of two state-contingent debt instruments: puttable and...

This paper examines the incentives from stock options for loss-averse employees subject to probability weighting. Employing the certainty equivalence principle, I built on insights from Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) to derive a continuous time model to value options from the perspective of a...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governancefeatures in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downsof U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs hadparticularly...

We investigate whether bank performance during the credit crisis of 2008 is related to CEOincentives and share ownership before the crisis and whether CEOs reduced their equity stakes intheir banks in anticipation of the crisis. There is no evidence that banks with CEOs whoseincentives were...

A fund's performance is usually compared to the performance of an index or other funds. If a fund trails the benchmark, the fund manager is often replaced. We argue that this may lead to excessive risk-taking if fund managers differ in ability and have the opportunity to take excessive risk. To...

We recently experienced a global financial crisis so severe that only massive rescue operations by governments around the world prevented a total financial market meltdown and perhaps another global Great Depression. One necessary precondition for the crisis was the perverse, bonus-driven...