Nittai K. Bergman

Employee sentiment and stock option compensation

Abstract The use of equity-based compensation for rank-and-file employees is a puzzle. We analyze whether the popularity of option compensation may be driven by employee optimism, and show that optimism by itself is insufficient to make option compensation optimal. The crucial insight is that firms compete with financial markets as suppliers of equity to employees and that employees’ access to the equity market restricts firms’ ability to profit from employee optimism. Firms must be able to extract some of the implied rents even though employees can purchase company equity in the financial markets. Such rent extraction becomes feasible if employees prefer the stock options offered by firms to the equity offered by the market, or if the traded equity is overvalued. We provide empirical evidence that firms use broad-based option compensation when boundedly rational employees are likely to be excessively optimistic about company stock, and when employees are likely to strictly prefer options over stock.

Vintage Capital and Creditor Protection

We provide novel evidence linking the level of creditor protection provided by law to the degree of usage of technologically older, vintage capital in the airline industry. Using a panel of aircraft-level data around the world, we find that better creditor rights are associated with both aircraft of a younger vintage and newer technology as well as firms with larger aircraft fleets. We propose that by mitigating financial shortfalls, enhanced legal protection of creditors facilitates the ability of firms to make large capital investments, adapt advanced technologies and foster productivity.

Credit Market Freezes

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008–2009, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became highly illiquid. In this paper, we analyze liquidity in bond markets during financial crises and compare two main theories of liquidity in markets: (1) asymmetric information and adverse selection, and (2) heterogenous beliefs. Analyzing the 1873 financial crisis as well as the 2008–2009 crisis, we find that when bond value deteriorates, bond illiquidity increases, consistent with an adverse-selection model of the information sensitivity of debt contracts. While we show that the adverse-selection model of debt liquidity explains a large portion of the rise in illiquidity, we find little support for the hypothesis that opinion dispersion explains illiquidity in financial crises.

The Effect of Cash Injections: Evidence from the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis

What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis, we analyze and measure the effect of local cash flow shocks on the real and financial sector. We show that such cash flow shocks have significant impact on a host of economic outcomes, including land values, loan delinquency rates, the probability of bank failure, employment, and wages. Estimates of the effect of local cash flow shocks on county income levels during the financial crisis yield a multiplier of 1.63.