Not So Lucky Any More: CEO Compensation in Financially Distressed Firms

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to “managerial power” or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public companies that were ever in financial distress between 1992 and 2005. Using a bias-corrected matching estimator that estimates the causal effects of financial distress, we find that, for the distressed firms, CEO turnover rates increase markedly and their CEOs, both incumbents and successors, experience significant reductions in total compensation. The bulk of the reduction in total compensation derives from the decline in value of stock option grants, which we argue is due to a change in the opportunistic timing of option grants. We define “lucky” grants as those with grant prices below or at the lowest stock price of the grant month, and we find that the proportion of lucky grants for financially distressed firms is higher before insolvency and lower upon and after insolvency, while the proportion for similar but solvent firms remains stable throughout the period. We interpret this evidence as consistent with a decrease in managerial power induced by a tightening in the “outrage” constraint due to the episode of financial distress.CEO compensation, CEO turnover, financial distress, lucky grants, bias-corrected matching estimators

Top-N Recommender System via Matrix Completion

Top-N recommender systems have been investigated widely both in industry and academia. However, the recommendation quality is far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a simple yet promising algorithm. We fill the user-item matrix based on a low-rank assumption and simultaneously keep the original information. To do that, a nonconvex rank relaxation rather than the nuclear norm is adopted to provide a better rank approximation and an efficient optimization strategy is designed. A comprehensive set of experiments on real datasets demonstrates that our method pushes the accuracy of Top-N recommendation to a new level.Comment: AAAI 201

Twin Learning for Similarity and Clustering: A Unified Kernel Approach

Many similarity-based clustering methods work in two separate steps including similarity matrix computation and subsequent spectral clustering. However, similarity measurement is challenging because it is usually impacted by many factors, e.g., the choice of similarity metric, neighborhood size, scale of data, noise and outliers. Thus the learned similarity matrix is often not suitable, let alone optimal, for the subsequent clustering. In addition, nonlinear similarity often exists in many real world data which, however, has not been effectively considered by most existing methods. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a model to simultaneously learn cluster indicator matrix and similarity information in kernel spaces in a principled way. We show theoretical relationships to kernel k-means, k-means, and spectral clustering methods. Then, to address the practical issue of how to select the most suitable kernel for a particular clustering task, we further extend our model with a multiple kernel learning ability. With this joint model, we can automatically accomplish three subtasks of finding the best cluster indicator matrix, the most accurate similarity relations and the optimal combination of multiple kernels. By leveraging the interactions between these three subtasks in a joint framework, each subtask can be iteratively boosted by using the results of the others towards an overall optimal solution. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Comment: Published in AAAI 201

CEO Power and Compensation in Financially Distressed Firms

We study the changes in CEO power and compensation that arise when firms go through financial distress. We use a matching estimator to identify suitable controls and estimate the causal effects of financial distress for a sample of U.S. public companies from 1992 to 2005. We document that, relative to those in control firms, the CEOs of distressed firms experience significant reductions in total compensation; the bulk of this reduction derives from the decline in value of new grants of stock options. These results hold not only for incumbent CEOs but also, surprisingly, for newly hired CEOs. Financial distress has important consequences on corporate governance, decreasing managerial influence over the board. We find that, among distressed firms, there is a significant decrease in the proportion of CEOs holding board chairmanship, and in the fractions of executives serving as directors or in the compensation committee of the board. We also show that periods of financial distress are associated with a decrease in opportunistic timing behavior of stock option awards. The results are suggestive of a link between managerial power and executive compensation.CEO compensation, financial distress, lucky grants, managerial influence, bias-corrected matching estimators

On the Relationship Between the Conditional Mean and Volatility of Stock Returns: A Latent VAR Approach

We model the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns as a latent vector autoregressive (VAR) process to study the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between expected returns and risk in a flexible statistical framework and without relying on exogenous predictors. We find a strong and robust negative correlation between the innovations to the conditional moments that leads to pronounced counter-cyclical variation in the Sharpe ratio. We document significant lead-lag correlations between the conditional moments that also appear related to business cycles. Finally, we show that although the conditional correlation between the mean and volatility is negative, the unconditional correlation is positive due to the lead-lag correlations.

Not So Lucky Any More: CEO Compensation in Financially Distressed Firms

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to "managerial power" or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public companies that were ever in financial distress between 1992 and 2005. Using a bias-corrected matching estimator that estimates the causal effects of financial distress, we find that, for the distressed firms, CEO turnover rates increase markedly and their CEOs, both incumbents and successors, experience significant reductions in total compensation. The bulk of the reduction in total compensation derives from the decline in value of stock option grants, which we argue is due to a change in the opportunistic timing of option grants. We define "lucky" grants as those with grant prices below or at the lowest stock price of the grant month, and we find that the proportion of lucky grants for financially distressed firms is higher before insolvency and lower upon and after insolvency, while the proportion for similar but solvent firms remains stable throughout the period. We interpret this evidence as consistent with a decrease in managerial power induced by a tightening in the "outrage" constraint due to the episode of financial distress.CEO compensation, CEO turnover, financial distress, lucky grants, bias-corrected matching estimators

Paralanguage

Paralanguage is a very important aspect in human language communication. In the communication of people it is not only the important method to express the significance, the essential middle link of words, but also is the same with the language communication and other non-language communications, can transmit the different semantic information, express varies words significance, has the special communicative function and value. Paralanguage makes the language communication to be more accurate, vividly and full of expressive force. It plays the role of make the words significance determined, beautification, substitution and deepened. Paralanguage is the important component of our natural communication; it is essential supplement to the spoken language communication. The same with language, paralanguage is also a part of culture. Paralanguage and language form an omni-directional communication system together. The lack of any side will cause incomplete of communication and efficiency reduction. We have to use paralanguage appropriately in communication.In addition, paralanguage has its arbitrariness and will cause the multi-dimensional pattern of culture