Two Essays On Corporate Policy And Corporate Governance

Corporate governance of financial and non-financial firms is critical in modern corporations with diffuse stock ownership, which deals with the agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. Corporate governance has a profound impact on various corporate policy, and firm value in the end. This study examines the importance of corporate governance and its influences on various corporate policy and firm value and risks for both financial and non-financial firms. Chapter 1 investigates the association between the firm's liquidity level and liquidity mix on the one hand and CEO entrenchment on the other. CEO entrenchment may distort the firms' liquidity policy because managers and shareholders may have conflicting preferences between cash and lines of credit. Using lines of credit data from 1996 to 2008, we find five main results. First, entrenched CEOs hold more liquidity as measured by the sum of cash and lines of credit. Second, entrenched managers have a preference for cash over lines of credit because while cash gives them flexibility, lines of credit are accompanied with bank restrictions and monitoring. Third, entrenched CEOs also use more lines of credit because of the extra liquidity it provides, despite the associated bank monitoring. Fourth, entrenched CEOs in smaller and opaque firms tend to hold more liquidity. Five, entrenched CEO's preference for cash versus lines of credit is stronger for large and transparent firms, compared to small and opaque firms. These findings imply that firms should better align the interests of the entrenched managers with those of the shareholders in order to limit the excessive liquidity holding of firms when CEOs are entrenched and to thereby increase firms' profitability. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between bank holding company (BHC) performance, risk and "busy" board of directors, an overlooked dimension of corporate governance in the banking literature. Busy directors are defined as directors with three or more directorships. The sample covers the 2001-2010 period. We employ a simultaneous equation framework and estimate the models employing the three stage least square (3SLS) technique in order to account for endogeneity. Several interesting results are obtained. First, BHC performance, as measured by return on assets (ROA), Tobin's Q and earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) over total assets is positively associated with busy directors. Second, BHC total risk (standard deviation of stock returns), market risk (market beta), idiosyncratic risk (standard errors of the CAPM model) credit risk (percentage of non-performing assets over total assets) and default risk (HigherZ-Score) are inversely related to it. Third, busy directors are not more likely to become problem directors, in the sense of failing the meeting-attendance-criterion (75% attendance). Fourth, the benefits of having busy directors in terms of performance improvement strengthened but the benefits of risk reduction declined during the recent financial crisis These findings partially alleviate concerns that when directors become too busy with multiple directorships, they shirk their responsibilities. Major implications for investors, regulators, and firm managers are drawn. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of CEO entrenchment on the loan syndication structure. Over the past decade, syndicated loans have played an increasingly important role in corporate financing. Unlike a traditional bank loan with only a single creditor, a syndicated loan involves a group of lenders: a lead arranger and a number of participant lenders. The syndication process, therefore, generates an additional dimension of agency problem between the lead arranger and the participant lenders, besides the traditional agency cost of debt between the borrowing firm and the lender (Diamond, 1984; Holmstrom and Tirole, 1997). Several results are obtained about syndicated loans made to firms with more entrenched CEOs. First, in these loans the number of participant lenders and their share in the loan are smaller; the lead arranger retains a larger loan share. Second, these loans are more closely held resulting in a higher Herfindahl index of loan concentration. Third, foreign lenders are less involved in these loans. Specifically, the number of foreign lenders and the percentage of loans held by foreign lenders are both smaller. Our findings shed light on the two types of agency problems associated with the syndicated loans, and have great implication for the firms' shareholders, creditors and regulators.

This dissertation titled "Essays in Corporate Governance" contains two essays in matters relating to corporations and their governance practices. The titles and the abstracts of the two papers are presented below. Does it pay to play? Political donations around mergers and acquisitions: This study focuses on corporate political donations around mergers and acquisitions of U.S. firms. I track the political contributions made by firms involved in large U.S. mergers from 2000 to 2010 by focusing on four different ways that corporations contribute to political parties: political action committee (PAC) donations, PAC to PAC donations, soft money and 527 committees' donations, and individual donations. Consistent with politicians' rent-seeking behavior, I document evidence that participants in mergers and acquisitions alter their donations around these deals in attempts to influence the deal outcome and appear to do so particularly around deals where donations may be more effective. Overall, I find that large shifts in donations around mergers and acquisitions increase the likelihood of deal completion. After controlling for firm and merger characteristics, the firms involved in mergers make more political contributions after a deal is announced compared to periods before the announcement and after a deal is finalized. This behavior is more pronounced when the deal continues for an extended period of time, which is consistent with the notion that these deals may face more regulatory hurdles and donations may likely impact the merger outcome. Furthermore, I document higher bidder and target abnormal donations after a merger announcement when the market reaction is negative. Finally, donation intensity increases when the merger would cause the industry concentrations ratios to increase above normal. These results collectively suggest that firms aggressively manage political donations around merger and acquisition activity, potentially indicating agency conflicts driving these donations. Director Alpha: An objective measure of director contribution: The appointment of high value directors is associated with immediate positive market reaction, and the presence of high value directors in the board enhances long-run firm value. We identify the contribution of directors by alpha, or the abnormal risk-adjusted stock returns that are generated in other firms on whose boards they sit. We find that investors react positively when high alpha directors are appointed to high alpha boards. CEOs and individuals with MBA or CPA designations are more likely to be high value directors. We find that high alpha directors contribute significantly to firm value. For the typical firm, our parameter estimates imply that replacing a negative alpha director with a positive one is associated with a 3.3% improvement in firm value.

Corporate governance has become an important issue in all industrial economies. This text has grown out of a conference entitled Comparative Corporate Governance, An International Conference, United States - Japan - Western Europe which considered the subject.

Corporate Governance is a subject of great interest to academics, investors, and politicians throughout the world. Corporate governance is associated with the way firms are managed and controlled. Countries have adopted different governance systems to resolve the corporate governance issues. Anglo-Saxon systems differ from European and Japanese systems, and Eastern Europe and China, for instance, experiment with the way private organizations should be governed. Despite the great interest and intense debate, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various governance systems is still sparse. This book brings together most current contributions from various perspectives and from an international angle. The book is an essential reading for academics, university students, practitioners, investors, politicians, and legislators.

This dissertation provides a theoretical analysis of several corporate governance mechanisms in the presence of information asymmetries and agency conflicts between shareholders, managers, and directors. The first essay of the dissertation analyzes decision-making in corporate boards and studies how board characteristics and the design of board meetings affect board decisions. Two other essays are on shareholder activism. The second essay focuses on voting for non-binding shareholder proposals and examines its effectiveness in conveying shareholder views to the management. The third essay considers another common form of shareholder activism, private negotiations with the management, and studies the activist's choice between private negotiations and public confrontation. The first essay, "Communication and Decision-Making in Corporate Boards, " develops a theory of communication and collective decision-making in a board of directors whose members have private information about the issue under discussion. The key element of the model is that the quality of board communication is endogenous, because it depends on the time and effort directors are willing to put into communicating their information to others. Directors may have biases regarding the decision and may be reluctant to disagree with the prevailing opinion in the boardroom. I show that when effective communication is personally costly for directors, both stronger preferences for conformity and stronger biases may improve the board's decisions because directors will have stronger incentives to convince others of their position. These results have implications for the design of board policies, including the use of open vs. secret ballot voting, the establishment and composition of committees, and the frequency of executive sessions of outside directors. The second essay, "Non-Binding Voting for Shareholder Proposals, " which is co-authored with Doron Levit and is forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, considers another setting where information relevant for the firm's decisions is dispersed among many agents, namely, the firm's large shareholders. Our main question is whether voting for non-binding shareholder proposals fulfills its intended role of conveying shareholders' expectations to the management. We show that when the interests of the manager and shareholders are not aligned, non-binding voting generally fails to convey shareholder views to the manager. This distinguishes voting for non-binding proposals from standard voting for binding proposals, where some information is always conveyed. In practice, the effectiveness of shareholder proposals may be affected by external governance mechanisms, such as the market for corporate control in the form of activist investors. Our analysis demonstrates that the presence of an activist investor can enhance the advisory role of non-binding voting only if there is substantial conflict of interest between the activist and shareholders. Although shareholder proposals have become increasingly common in recent years, submitting a proposal to a shareholder vote is often viewed by activist investors as a tactic of last resort. According to survey evidence, activists generally try to achieve their objectives through private negotiations with the management and use confrontational tactics only if these negotiations are not successful. The third essay, "Behind-the-Scene Negotiations in Shareholder Activism, " examines under which circumstances negotiations between the activist and the management fail. I study these negotiations in a bargaining framework where the manager is privately informed about his private benefits. The model provides implications for the likelihood of proposal withdrawals and announcement effects of proposal submissions. It demonstrates, in particular, that the announcement of an activist's intervention may have a negative price effect even if the intervention is known to be beneficial to the company.

This thesis consists of two essays examining the roles of corporate governance and investor disagreement, respectively, in the performance and stock market valuations of firms. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that the relationship between corporate governance and firm performance varies with industry performance cycles. Firms with strong shareholder rights capture higher profits than poorly-governed firms in the same industry during highly profitable periods for the industry, but both groups have similar profits during weaker industry conditions. Analyst forecasts indicate that the pattern is expected, suggesting that the higher valuations of well-governed firms are due to this higher expected productivity in good times. Consistent with such expectations and with an updating of valuations as anticipated industry conditions change, positive abnormal stock returns to good governance are concentrated in periods of high industry returns, and are at least partially reversed during industry downturns. My results provide an alternative to learning and static risk theories in explaining the apparent abnormal returns to governance and their disappearance after 2001. In Chapter 2, I consider the impact of heterogeneous shareholder beliefs on stock prices, focusing on the context of corporate spin-offs and mergers. I extend theoretical work by Miller (1977) and Jarrow (1980) to show that when investors disagree about the prospects of different businesses and at least some of them are restricted from short-selling, the market price of an unseparable bundle of two enterprises will often be lower from the sum of the prices at which they would trade as standalone entities. Empirically, I construct a novel measure of observed disagreement that is informed by the theory and is less open to alternative interpretations than existing disagreement proxies. Consistent with the theory, I find that higher disagreement about the two components being either separated or joined is related to a positive return in the case of spin-offs and a negative return in stock mergers. Importantly, since I focus on returns on the ex date of these transactions, on which no new business information is released, these findings are unrelated to the expected business impact of the transactions.

Corporate law and governance are at the forefront of regulatory activities worldwide, and subject to increasing public attention in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Comprehensively referencing the key debates, the Handbook provides a much-needed framework for understanding the aims and methods of legal research in the field.