Christopher S. Armstrong

Economic Characteristics, Corporate Governance, and the Influence of Compensation Consultants on Executive Pay Levels

This study investigates the relation between the use of compensation consultants and CEO pay levels. Using new proxy statement disclosures from 2,116 companies, we examine claims that pay is higher in clients of compensation consultants, and test whether any pay differences in users and non-users of consultants are due to differences in economic or corporate governance characteristics. We find that CEO pay is generally higher in clients of most consulting firms, even after controlling for economic determinants of compensation. However, when users and non-users are matched on both economic and governance characteristics, differences in pay levels are not statistically significant. These results are consistent with claims that compensation consultants provide a mechanism for CEOs of companies with weak governance to extract and justify excess pay. Finally, we find no support for claims that CEO pay is higher in conflicted consultants that also offer additional non-compensation related services.

Abnormal Accruals in Newly Public Companies: Opportunistic Misreporting or Economic Activity?

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these accruals do not appear to benefit managers and instead result from the normal economic activity of newly public companies. In particular, and in contrast to the notion that managers benefit from inflating accruals through an inflated issue price, inflated post-IPO equity values, and increased insider trading profits, we find no evidence of a relation between abnormal accruals and these outcomes. Instead, consistent with these accruals resulting from normal economic activity, we find that these accruals are attributable to the investment of IPO proceeds in working capital and that controlling for the amount of IPO proceeds invested in working capital produces a more powerful accrual-based measure of misreporting.

Endogenous Selection and Moral Hazard in Compensation Contracts

The two major paradigms in the theoretical agency literature are moral hazard (i.e., hidden action) and adverse selection (i.e., hidden information). Prior research typically solves these problems in isolation, as opposed to simultaneously incorporating both adverse selection and moral hazard features. We formulate two complementary generalized principal-agent models that incorporate features observed in real-world contracting environments (e.g., agents with power utility and limited liability, lognormal stock price distributions, and stock options) as mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). We use state-of-the-art numerical algorithms to solve the resulting models. We find that many of the standard results no longer obtain when wealth effects are present. We also develop a new measure of incentives calculated as the change in the agents certainty equivalent under the optimal contract for a change in action evaluated at the optimal action. This measure facilitates interpretation of the resulting contracts and allows us to compare contracts across different contracting environments.

Market-to-Revenue Multiples in Public and Private Capital Markets

The behavior and determinants of market-to-revenue ratios in public and private capital markets is examined. Three samples are analysed: (1) all publicly traded stocks listed at some time on the New York Stock Exchange/American Stock Exchange/National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System in the 1980—2004 period; (2) sample of over 300 so-called ‘internet companies’ in the 1996—2004 period; and (3) over 5500 privately held venture capital-backed companies in the 1992—2004 period. Both company size and the most recent revenue growth rate are found to explain significant variation across companies in their market-to-revenue multiples — smaller companies and companies with higher recent revenue growth rates have higher multiples. We also document how the capital market appears to use a broad-based information set when setting market-to-revenue multiples for companies with negative revenue growth rates — transitory revenue growth components appear to be identified (in a probabilistic sense) by the capital market. Contrary to much anecdotal comment, we present evidence that the capital market behaved directionally along the lines predicted by capital market theory in the pricing of internet stocks in the 1996—2004 period.

Corporate Hedging and the Design of Incentive-Compensation Contracts

We use the introduction of exchange-traded weather derivative contracts as a natural experiment to examine the relation between risk and incentives. Specifically, we examine how executives’ ability to hedge weather-related risk that was previously difficult and costly to manage influences the design of their incentive-compensation contracts. Using both traditional and fuzzy differences-in-differences research designs, we find that the CEOs of firms that are relatively more exposed to weather risk — and therefore stand to benefit the most from hedging this source of risk — receive less annual compensation and have fewer equity incentives following the introduction of weather derivatives. We attribute the former finding to a reduction in the risk premium that CEOs demand for exposure to firm risk. The latter finding suggests that uncertainty in firms’ operating environments and equity incentives are complements for our sample firms. Collectively, our results show that hedging corporate risk alters the nature of agency conflicts and influences the design of executives’ incentive-compensation contracts.

Internal versus External Earnings per Share Goals and CEO Incentives

We examine differences in CEO achievement of EPS goals set separately through analyst forecasts and firm bonus plans. Having different goals for the same performance metric enables us to assess their relative importance in incentivizing CEOs. We find CEOs frequently achieve analyst forecasts, but rarely achieve bonus goals exceeding the forecast. Despite lower compensation risk accompanying easier goals, we also find that bonus goals set below forecasts are associated with greater pay, suggesting the use of easier goals to compensate CEOs while maintaining the appearance of pay-for-performance. The results highlight the importance of considering both sets of performance goals simultaneously when evaluating their incentive effects.