Matthew Serfling

CEO Age and the Riskiness of Corporate Policies

Prior theoretical work generates conflicting predictions with respect to how CEO age impacts risk-taking behavior. Consistent with the prediction that risk-taking behavior decreases as CEOs become older, I document a negative relation between CEO age and stock return volatility. Further analyses reveal that older CEOs reduce firm risk through less risky investment policies. Specifically, older CEOs invest less in research and development, make more diversifying acquisitions, manage firms with more diversified operations, and maintain lower operating leverage. Further, firm risk and the riskiness of corporate policies are lowest when both the CEO and the next most influential executive are older and highest when both of these managers are younger. Although older CEOs prefer less risky investment policies, I document results suggesting that CEO and firm risk preferences tend to be aligned. Lastly, I find that a trading strategy that goes long in a portfolio of stocks consisting of firms managed by younger CEOs and short in a portfolio of stocks comprised of firms led by older CEOs would generate positive risk-adjusted returns. Overall, my results imply that CEO age can have a significant impact on risk-taking behavior and firm performance.

Firing Costs and Capital Structure Decisions

I exploit the adoption of state-level labor protection laws as an exogenous increase in employee firing costs to examine how the costs associated with discharging workers affect capital structure decisions. I find that firms reduce debt ratios following the adoption of these laws, with this result stronger for firms that experience larger increases in firing costs. I also document that, following the adoption of these laws, a firms degree of operating leverage rises, earnings variability increases, and employment becomes more rigid. Overall, these results are consistent with higher firing costs crowding out financial leverage via increasing financial distress costs.

CEO Turnovers and Disruptions in Customer-Supplier Relationships

Events that disrupt customer-supplier relationships pose a source of risk for suppliers that depend on a customer for a large portion of their revenues. We identify the replacement of a customer’s CEO as a disruptive event that results in suppliers losing substantial sales to the customer following the turnover. This loss is greater when incumbents are more likely to be entrenched. Suppliers also experience declines in overall financial performance following this loss in sales as well as negative abnormal stock returns to announcements of customer CEO departures. Our findings suggest that these disruptions largely stem from successors divesting assets.

A Firm's Information Environment and Employee Wages

We test the hypothesis that less transparency in financial disclosures is an undesirable firm attribute that increases the amount of information and unemployment risk that employees bear, resulting in a wage premium. Using establishment-level wage data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we document that firms with less transparent disclosures pay their employees more, especially when employees bear greater information acquisition costs, have more influence in the wage-setting process, and own more stock in their firm. Our results also hold to utilizing instrumental variables and two quasi-natural experiments arising from the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as shocks to the transparency of a firm’s financial reporting environment. Overall, our results suggest that accounting disclosure choices can generate externalities on an important group of stakeholders.

Management Practices and Mergers and Acquisitions

Using a novel dataset of establishment-level management practices from the U.S. Census Bureau, we show that firms with more specific, formal, frequent, or explicit (i.e., “structured”) management practices tend to acquire establishments with less structured management practices, and following the acquisition, adopt more structured practices at the target establishments. These changes are larger when acquirers have a greater incentive and ability to make changes and are also associated with improvements in establishment performance. Overall, our findings suggest that the adoption of more structured management practices constitute an important source of value creation in mergers and acquisitions.

Asset Redeployability and the Choice between Bank Debt and Public Debt

Abstract A firm with less redeployable assets, which are assets that have fewer alternative uses outside the firm, is more likely to borrow from banks than issue public debt. These findings are consistent with firms with less redeployable assets valuing the ability to renegotiate bank debt contracts instead of selling assets in the event of default. Consistent with this mechanism, firms with lower asset redeployability sell fewer assets following covenant violations. Our results contribute to work on the determinants of which debt markets a firm chooses to borrow from and the role that banks play as intermediaries.

Employment Protection, Investment, and Firm Growth

We exploit the adoption of U.S. state-level labor protection laws to study the effect of employment protection on corporate investment rates and sales growth. We find that, following the adoption of these laws, capital expenditures as a percentage of book assets decrease, resulting in slower sales growth. Our findings are consistent with theories predicting that greater employment protection discourages investment by making projects more irreversible. Supporting this channel, following negative cash flow shocks, firms are less likely to downsize operations in states that have adopted these laws but more likely to downsize in states that have not adopted these laws.Authors have furnished code, data, and an Internet Appendix, which are available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.