David Tsui

Executive bonus plans often incorporate performance measures that exclude particular costs—a practice we refer to as “cost shielding.” We predict that boards use cost shielding to mitigate underinvestment and insulate new managers from the costs of prior executives’ decisions. We find evidence that boards use cost shielding to deter underinvestment in intangibles and encourage managers to take advantage of growth opportunities. We also find that cost shielding tends to be elevated for newly-hired executives, and decreases over tenure. Collectively, our results suggest that boards deliberately choose performance metrics that alleviate agency conflicts.

We examine the sorting role of broad-based equity pay using detailed employee-level data. We propose trust in management as an important and beneficial characteristic over which equity pay sorts employees, as such pay typically leaves employees with concentrated positions in employer stock and therefore more exposed to the outcomes of management’s actions. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the relation between employees’ trust and voluntary turnover intentions is significantly stronger in the presence of a broad-based equity plan. Our findings provide insight into how broad-based equity pay can improve firm performance despite theoretical challenges regarding its incentive effects.

Prior literature suggests that voluntary disclosures of forward-looking information tend to lead to capital market benefits, but these disclosures may also result in negative capital market consequences if subsequent performance falls below expectations. We, therefore, hypothesize that convex equity incentives, which reward managers for stock price gains while limiting their exposure to losses, should promote greater voluntary forward-looking disclosure. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a significantly positive association between equity incentive convexity and forecast issuance and frequency. We also find that the positive association is more pronounced for firms with higher sales volatility and managers with shorter tenure, in which cases managers are more concerned with missing their own forecasts. Our study suggests that the risks arising from providing voluntary disclosures are important considerations in managers' disclosure decisions.

Given CEOs’ substantial equity portfolios, much recent literature on CEO incentives regards cash-based bonus plans as largely irrelevant, begging the question of why nearly all CEO compensation plans include such bonuses. We develop a new measure of bonus plan incentives, and document that performance sensitivities are much greater than prior estimates. We also test hypotheses regarding the role of bonuses in providing executives with individualized and team incentives. We find little evidence supporting the individualized incentives hypotheses, but consistent evidence that bonus plans appear to be used to encourage mutual monitoring and to facilitate coordination across the top management team as a whole.