Fenghua Song

Financial System Architecture and the Co-Evolution of Banks and Capital Markets

We examine financial system architecture evolution and show that banks and markets exhibit three forms of interaction: competition, complementarity and co-evolution. Co-evolution is generated by two elements missing in previous analyses: securitisation and bank equity capital. As banks evolve via improvements in credit screening, they securitise higher quality credits. This encourages greater investor participation and spurs capital market evolution. And, if capital market evolution is spurred by greater investor participation, banks find it cheaper to raise equity capital to satisfy endogenously arising risk-sensitive capital requirements. Bank evolution is thus stimulated as banks consequently serve previously unserved high-risk borrowers. Numerous additional results are obtained. Copyright

The Optimal Duration of Executive Compensation: Theory and Evidence

While much is made of the ills of “short-termism” in executive compensation, in reality very little is known empirically about the extent of short-termism in CEO compensation. This paper develops a new measure of CEO pay duration that reflects the vesting periods of different components of compensation, thereby quantifying the extent to which compensation is short-term and the extent to which it is long-term. It also develops a theoretical model that generates three predictions for which we find strong empirical support using our measure of pay duration. First, optimal pay duration is decreasing in the extent of mispricing of the firm’s stock. Second, optimal pay duration is longer in firms with poorer corporate governance. Third, CEOs with shorter pay durations are more likely to engage in myopic investment behavior, and this relationship is stronger when the extent of stock mispricing is larger.

Strategic Flexibility and the Optimality of Pay for Luck

While standard contract theory suggests that a CEO should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effects of sector performance (otherwise referred to as luck), there is overwhelming evidence that CEO pay is strongly and positively related to such luck. In this paper we offer an explanation for the observed pay for luck. We model a CEO charged with selecting the firms strategy which in turn affects the firms exposure to sector performance. To incentivize the CEO to optimally choose her firms sector exposure, pay contracts will be positively and sometimes asymmetrically related to sector performance. Using a multitude of proxies to capture the extent of strategic flexibility offered by firms to alter sector exposure we find strong empirical support for our model prediction of greater pay for luck. Our results indicate that the pay for luck is almost fully confined to firms in industries with high R&D expenditure and in multi-divisional firms. Our evidence is robust to alternate explanations such as CEO entrenchment.

The effect of taxes on the pricing of defaultable debt

Empirical studies have documented the dependence of corporate credit spreads on default risk, equity premiums, and taxes. However, taxes have previously not been incorporated into reduced-form credit risk models. Therefore, we first extend the existing literature by considering a default intensity that depends on taxes as well as the default-free short rate and a market index. Consequently, we establish a theoretical basis to explain previous empirical findings regarding the significant impact of taxation on defaultable bond prices. Unlike previous models, tax implications for defaultable debt cannot be constructed from a sum of tax effects on zero coupon bonds. Our empirical tests then illustrate the importance of taxation. In particular, the impact of taxation increases as a function of the debt’s maturity and coupon rate.