Firm Value and Managerial Incentives

40 Pages Posted: 4 Nov 2008

See all articles by Alexander Ljungqvist

Alexander Ljungqvist

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); Swedish House of Finance; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Michel A. Habib

University of Zurich; Swiss Finance Institute

Date Written: November 2000

Abstract

We examine the relation between firm value and managerial incentives in a sample of 1,307 publicly-held U.S. firms in 1992-1997. As predicted by Berle and Means (1932), we find that CEOs do not maximize firm value when they are not the residual claimant: our firms have higher Tobin’s Q, the higher are CEO stockholdings. We also investigate the incentive properties of options and find that CEOs appear to hold too many options and that these options are insufficiently sensitive to firm risk. Our results do not appear to be driven by endogeneity biases. To assess the economic significance of the suboptimal provision of incentives, we compute an explicit performance benchmark which compares a firm’s actual Tobin’s Q to the Q* of a hypothetica fully-efficient firm having the same inputs and characteristics as the original firm. The Q of the average sample firm is around 12% lower than its Q*, equivalent to a $751 million reduction in its potential market value.

Suggested Citation

Ljungqvist, Alexander and Ljungqvist, Alexander and Habib, Michel A., Firm Value and Managerial Incentives (November 2000). NYU Working Paper No. 2451/26705, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1295243

Alexander Ljungqvist (Contact Author)

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

Swedish House of Finance ( email )

Drottninggatan 98
111 60 Stockholm
Sweden

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium

Michel A. Habib

University of Zurich ( email )

Plattenstrasse 14
Zurich, 8032
Switzerland
41-44-634-2507 (Phone)
41-44-634-4903 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.isb.uzh.ch/institut/profs/mhabib.htm

Swiss Finance Institute ( email )

c/o University of Geneva
40, Bd du Pont-d'Arve
CH-1211 Geneva 4
Switzerland

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