MARKET BASED COMPENSATION, TRADING AND LIQUIDITY

This paper examines the role of trading and liquidity in a large competitive market with dispersed heterogenous information on market-based managerial compensation. The paper recognizes the endogenous nature of a firm’s stock price - it is the outcome of self-interested speculative trading motivated by imperfect information about future firm value. Using the stock price as performance measure means bench-marking the manager’s performance against the market’s expectation of that performance. We obtain two main results: first, the degree of market-based compensation is proportional to the market depth, which is a measure of the ease of information trading. Secondly, using the dynamic trading model of Vives (1995) we show that if the investment horizon of informed traders decreases, at equilibrium the managerial e.ort reduces, and the optimal contract prescribes stock-compensation with longer vesting period.

Market based compensation, price informativeness and short-term trading

This paper shows that there is a natural trade-off when designing market based executive compensation. The benefit of market based pay is that the stock price aggregates speculators’ dispersed information and there-fore takes a picture of managerial performance before the long-term value of a firm materializes. The cost is that informed speculators’ willingness to trade depends on trading that is unrelated to any information about the firm. Ideally, the CEO should be shielded from shocks that are not informative about his actions. But since information trading is impossible without non- nformation trading (due to the ”no-trade” theorem), shocks to prices caused by the latter are an unavoidable cost of market based pay. This trade-off generates a number of insights about the impact of market conditions, e.g. liquidity and trading horizons, on optimal market based pay. A more liquid market leads to more market based pay while short-term trading makes it more costly to provide such incentives leading to lower CEO effort and worse firm performance on average. The model is consistent with recent evidence showing that market based CEO incentives vary with market conditions, e.g. bid-ask spreads, the probability of informed trading (PIN) or the dispersion of analysts’ forecasts. JEL Classification: G39, D86, D82Executive compensation, liquidity, Moral Hazard, stock price informativeness, trading

Asymmetries of Information in Electronic Systems

We study the efficiency of the equilibrium price in a centralized, order-driven market where asymmetrically informed traders are active for several periods and can observe each other current and past orders, as in electronic systems of trading. We show that the more precise the information the higher the incentive to reveal it in the first trading rounds. On the contrary, strategic competition forces the less informed trader to wait the end of the trading period to reveal his information. This implies that when differences in information quality are very important, the liquidity of the market decreases as we approach the date of public revelation. We are able to show that more transparent markets as the ones organized via electronic systems are not performing better than markets organized on floor trade in terms of revelation of information, due to the oligopolistic behavior of insidersasymmetric information, liquidity, insider trading, strategic revelation

Essays in market microstructure

Doctorat en sciences économiques (ECON 3)--UCL, 200

Administrative panel development for 3D web configurators

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Takeover duration and negotiation process

We study the relations between takeover negotiations duration, competition and learning, focusing on the private phase of bidder-initiated transactions. While the negotiation goes on, both parties learn about true deal synergies. At any moment, rival bidders can show up and compete for the target. Using a discrete-time finite-horizon dynamic programming approach, we derive the equilibrium relations between the negotiation duration, the pressure of potential competition and the learning process. Next, we perform a calibration exercise on a large sample of merger negotiations with hand-collected data from the Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Our results provide evidence of a very competitive M&A (Mergers and acquisitions) market