This article investigates the changes in and the impacts of the incentive contracts of target firms that survived takeover attempts. Managers of unsuccessful takeover targets that performed poorly prior to takeover attempts received lower compensation and severance payment relative to their counterparts in successful takeover targets, and they benefited less from the completion of the acquisitions. Following the failure of the attempted bids, target firms improved their executives’ compensation packages and exhibited better subsequent firm performance with stronger pay–performance sensitivity. The compensation change was more evident in firms with weaker corporate governance structures before the takeover attempts. The evidence suggests that the external takeover market can have positive impacts by invoking internal control mechanisms, even without a successful merger.

This study investigates the effects of target information asymmetry in a takeover transaction. We find that a target with more information asymmetry receives a larger bid premium from the acquirer. We examine the response of the acquirer's investors to the bid to clarify whether the larger bid premium is an overpayment by the acquirer. We observe that the acquirer's investors respond more positively to the acquisition of an opaque target, indicating that the market recognizes the acquirer's valuation of the opaque target and agrees with the offer price. Our results indicate that corporate takeovers help to resolve asymmetric information in the capital market.

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of product market competition on earnings quality. Based on a sample from the US manufacturing sector for the period 1996–2005, we find consistent evidence showing a positive relation between product market competition and earnings quality. Additional tests also confirm a positive relation between product market competition and the precision of public and private information held by investors and analysts. We also provide evidence that firms competing in concentrated and heterogeneous industries are associated with a number of earnings attributes and information quality not shared by those competing in concentrated but homogeneous industries. These findings are consistent with the intuition that firms enjoying a monopolistic advantage tend to avoid the attention of their competitors and politicians by creating a more opaque information environment.

Using data from Hong Kong, a market that has family-concentrated ownership structure, we examine the relation between managerial ownership, the board of directors and firm performance. We first conduct analysis on the managerial ownership and firm performance to derive the turning points where either convergence of interest or entrenchment effect of managerial ownership is dominant. Based on these estimated turning points, we find that at low and high level of ownership, effective board mitigates the entrenchment effect associated with managerial ownership; at medium level of ownership, board effectiveness is less demanded. These findings suggest that managerial ownership and board monitoring are substitutes in mitigating the agency problem between managers and shareholders. We also find that effective board curbs the excessive compensation by entrenched managers to themselves at low level of managerial ownership.

We examine the impact of takeover bids on the function of internal incentive plan with a sample of takeover targets that successfully avoid the takeover attempts. Before the bids, unsuccessful takeover targets perform poorly in the stock market. Their CEOs are paid less, get less job security, and could benefit less from the completion of the takeovers, relative to the counterparts in completed takeover targets documented by Hartzell, Ofek, and Yermack (2004. Review of Financial Studies 17, 37-61). Following the unsuccessful bids, target firms fire undoing managements, construct severance contracts and grant a substantial restricted stocks and options to the CEOs. Their pay-performance sensitivity becomes stronger following the bids, and stock performance is also much better than before. Our study provides support to the theoretical argument that the threat of corporate takeover has a positive effect on the function of internal control mechanism in incentive alignment.

Studies on management turnover in Chinese companies typically find that turnover decisions are associated with companies' accounting performance. Using a sample of Chinese company turnovers during 2000–2003, we disaggregate their net-earnings into core, recurring non-core, and other non-recurring components. Analyzing these earnings components, we show that turnover decisions for government firms are related negatively only to recurring earnings which consist of operating, administrative and financial expenses. Leverage also plays a significant role suggesting the concern that high debt levels may reduce the impacts of the Chinese SOE reforms. However, turnovers in private firms are associated with poor core earnings, a result similar with profit-maximizing firms in developed economies.

We examine 1,612 acquisitions of publicly listed targets over the period of 1985 – 2006 and test directly how information asymmetry affects the bidding premiums and the announcement returns of the acquirer and the target. Based on several standard proxies for information asymmetry of target firms, we find that the bidding premium is positively correlated with these proxies. We provide explanation for this seemingly counter-intuitive result which is more apparent than real. The information asymmetry proxies also correlate positively with the announcement cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) of the acquirer over the five-day event window. More importantly, notwithstanding the general findings that acquirers earn an average of zero or mildly negative CARs during the takeover announcement period, we observe that the acquirer CARs are positive for the target group at the highest percentile (i.e., highest opacity) in our asymmetry grouping. Apparently, the market rewards acquirers who take in more opaque targets. We also find similar positive relationship of information asymmetry and the announcement returns for target firms. We argue that when the target is more opaque to the market, the takeover announcement has stronger certifying power for the market to re-evaluate the takeover target more favorably.

Abstract. In decentralized economies with transaction costs in contracting, it is demonstrated that an endogenous demand exists for the recording of events that affect the firm's value (“historical events”) and for the perpetual maintenance of audit trails to those records. A demand for the aggregation of records into reports (such as the financial statements) is derived from the costliness of the design, implementation and processing of contracts based on the primary data. But if principals do not control the recording or the reporting process, the agents will distort both the records and reports to their advantage. This gives rise to a demand for auditing services, which in turn creates a demand for audit trails, the causal links to verifiable facts underlying the records. Due to the costs of verification, with sufficient penalties and a positive probability of detection, random sample verification is as efficient as exhaustive verification. For random sample verification to be effective, the maintenance of audit trails for the life of the firm is necessary.Résumé. Dans les économies décentralisées où les contrats mandants‐mandataires ajoutent des coûts aux opérations, l'expérience démontre qu'il existe une demande endogène pour l'enregistrement des événements qui affectent la valeur de l'entreprise («événements historiques») et le maintien perpétuel de pistes de vérifications sous‐jacentes à ces enregistrements. La sollicitation d'une agrégation de ces enregistrements sous forme de rapports (les états financiers, par exemple) procède du fait que la conception, la mise en place et le traitement des contrats basés sur les données d'origine sont peu coûteux. Mais si les mandants ne contrôlent ni renregistrement ni le processus de communication de l'information, les mandataires sont susceptibles d'altérer les enregistrements aussi bien que les rapports en leur faveur. Cette constatation est à l'origine de la demande de services de vérification qui, à son tour, crée une demande de pistes de vérification, c'est‐à‐dire l'identification des liens accidentels des faits vérifiables sous‐jacents avec les enregistrements. Compte tenu des coûts de vérification, lorsque des pénalisations suffisantes et une bonne probabilité de détection existent, la vérification à partir d'échantillons aléatoires constitue une vérification aussi efficace qu'une verification exhaustive. Pour que la vérification à partir d'échantillons aléatoires soit efficace, elle exige cependant le maintien perpétuel des pistes de vérification.

AbstractThis study investigates the differential wealth impact of the National Energy Program on Canadian‐ versus foreign‐owned oil companies operating in Canada. The issue is analyzed with a stochastic oligopoly model of the industry, and the model's empirical implications are tested using the share prices of 60 firms. Both the cross‐sectional test and the time‐series test indicate that the Program announcement had an adverse impact on foreign‐owned firms relative to Canadian‐owned firms in terms of significant negative returns during the budget week, but the evidence indicates that this impact was not anticipated by the market before the announcement.RésuméCette étude examine I'impact du Programme national de I'énergie sur la valeur des compagnies pétrolières étrangères et le compare à I'impact sur les compagnies sous contrǒle canadien. L'analyse est faite à partir d'un modèle stochastique d'oligopole pour le secteur pétrolier. Les conclusions de l'analyse sont testées empiriquement à partir duprix des litres de 60 compagnies. Les résultats des tests inter‐compagnies et de ceux sur les séries temporelles suggèrent que I'annonce du Programme a eu un effet négatif plus grand sur les compagnies étrangères, comme I'indiquent les rendements négatifs importants observés durant la semaine du discours du budget. II n'est cependant pas évident que cet effet ait été anticipé par le marché boursier avant I'annonce du programme.