Merger efficiency and managerial incentives

Merger Efficiency and Managerial Incentives

Essays on Earnings Management, Investment Efficiency, and Managerial Incentives

In response to accounting scandals, market control systems (e.g. regulations related to internal control systems) have become more stringent in order to restore investors’ confidence in capital markets. Tightening control systems has triggered a fierce debate on its effect on both capital markets and the real economy. My dissertation studies how mitigating earnings management by tightening cont...

Managerial Incentives and Competition

This paper experimentally tests the impact of managerial incentives on competitive (market) outcomes. We use a Cournot duopoly game to show that when managers’ incentives are based on the firm’s absolute performance (profits), collusion can be sustained. However, when managers’ incentives are based on the firm’s relative performance (their profits relative to the other firm’s profits), this dri...

Managerial Motivation Dynamics and Incentives

Firms can increase profitability by appropriately motivating managers. We investigate drivers of managerial motivation, and propose how firms can use performance-pay to alter motivational patterns. We focus on the agent’s optimal effort decision in trading off compensation utility with effort cost in a static and dynamic setting. Surprisingly, we find that lower risk aversion or increased pay a...

Cartel Formation and Managerial Incentives

We study the formation of cartels within two di¤erent contexts. First, we consider internal-external stability based models which, due to …rms’ free-riding incentives, lead to the inexistence of stable cartels. Second, we introduce the dynamic aspect of coalition formation. That is, when considering a cartel we consider also any cartel that can be reached through a succession of moves. Despite ...