Stockholder and Bondholder Reactions To Revelations of Large CEO Inside Debt Holdings: An Empirical Analysis (CRI 2009-005)

We conduct an event study of stockholders’ and bondholders’ reactions to companies’ initial reports of their CEOs’ inside debt positions, as required by SEC disclosure regulations that became effective early in 2007. Results show that bond prices rise, equity prices fall, and the volatility of both securities drops at the time of disclosures by firms whose CEOs have sizeable pensions or deferred compensation. The results indicate a transfer of value from equity toward debt, as well as an overall destruction of enterprise value, when a CEO’s inside debt holdings are large

Stockholder and Bondholder Reactions To Revelations of Large CEO Inside Debt Holdings: An Empirical Analysis

We conduct an event study of stockholders’ and bondholders’ reactions to companies’ initial reports of their CEOs’ inside debt positions, as required by SEC disclosure regulations that became effective early in 2007. Results show that bond prices rise, equity prices fall, and the volatility of both securities drops at the time of disclosures by firms whose CEOs have sizeable pensions or deferred compensation. The results indicate a transfer of value from equity toward debt, as well as an overall destruction of enterprise value, when a CEO’s inside debt holdings are large

Pose-Guided Multi-Granularity Attention Network for Text-Based Person Search

Text-based person search aims to retrieve the corresponding person images in an image database by virtue of a describing sentence about the person, which poses great potential for various applications such as video surveillance. Extracting visual contents corresponding to the human description is the key to this cross-modal matching problem. Moreover, correlated images and descriptions involve different granularities of semantic relevance, which is usually ignored in previous methods. To exploit the multilevel corresponding visual contents, we propose a pose-guided multi-granularity attention network (PMA). Firstly, we propose a coarse alignment network (CA) to select the related image regions to the global description by a similarity-based attention. To further capture the phrase-related visual body part, a fine-grained alignment network (FA) is proposed, which employs pose information to learn latent semantic alignment between visual body part and textual noun phrase. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we perform extensive experiments on the CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES) which is currently the only available dataset for text-based person search. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15 \% in terms of the top-1 metric.Comment: published in AAAI2020(oral

The Impact of Shareholder Control on Bondholders

This paper investigates the effect of shareholder control on bondholder wealth. While stronger shareholder control can benefit bondholders by disciplining managers, it also increases the likelihood of events that can hurt bondholders, e.g. hostile takeovers. We hypothesize that shareholder control can have contrasting effects on bond yields depending on the takeover vulnerability of a firm. Using the presence of an institutional blockholder to proxy for shareholder control and firm-level anti-takeover provisions to proxy for takeover vulnerability, we find that shareholder control is associated with lower yields if the firm is protected from takeovers. We also find that shareholder control is associated with higher yields if the firm is exposed to takeovers. The contrasting effects of shareholder control on yields are the strongest for firms that are small and have low leverage. In the presence of shareholder control, the difference in bond yields due to differences in takeover vulnerability can be as high as 93 basis points. Further, the results are insignificant for a sub-sample of firms where the bondholders are protected from takeovers through the poison put covenant. Bond ratings also appear to incorporate a similar effect of shareholder control on bondholders Finally, we find that a bond pricing model that does not account for shareholder control generates an annualized abnormal return of 1% to 1.4% for portfolios that long firms with both strong shareholder control and high takeover vulnerability and short firms without either shareholder control or takeover vulnerability. Combined, these results suggest that the use of different governance mechanisms, such as shareholder monitoring and takeover vulnerability, depends on a firm’s capital structure and that bond-pricing models should account for shareholder control