Mandatory stock ownership plans require executives to hold a minimum level of stock. I exploit these changes in managerial stock ownership to examine the relation between managerial ownership and manager-shareholder incentive alignment. In contrast to prior work that suggests equity incentives induce opportunistic managerial behavior, I find earnings management declines following the adoption of mandatory stock ownership plans relative to a propensity-matched control sample. I also posit and find a reduction in bid-ask spreads following plan adoptions, consistent with manager-shareholder incentive alignment improving market liquidity and decreasing information asymmetry. These findings are consistent with boards of directors contracting with managers to reduce the agency costs of equity.

Zero-cost collars and equity swaps provide insiders with the opportunity to hedge the risk associated with their personal holdings in the company's equity. Consequently their use has important implications for incentive-based contracting and for understanding insider-trading behavior. Our analysis indicates that these transactions generally involve high-ranking insiders, and effectively reduce their ownership by about 25% on average. Given the potential of these financial instruments to substantially alter the incentive alignment between managers and shareholders, we suggest that increasing the transparency of these transactions may provide valuable information to investors.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: sehr gut, University of Münster (Finance Center Münster), language: English, abstract: Many scholars have analyzed whether and how management share ownership should be used in terms of a corporate governance instrument to enhance corporate performance. The empirical results, however, have been inconclusive till this day. This seminar paper attempts to explain the problems and difficulties that underlie the obscurity and how researches might eventually unravel this challenge.

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.