SUBJECT AREAS: Corporate Finance, Valuation, Capital Budgeting, Investment Policy, Economic Value Added, EVA, Market Value Added, MVA, Net Present Value, NPV, cash flows, free cash flows real free cash flowsThis technical note studies Economic Value Added, EVA. First, a conceptual framework...

Using the compensation gap between a CEO and the second-highest-paid CEO in the same Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a proxy for local tournament incentives, I document a positive relation between local tournament incentives and firm risk. Specifically, CEOs who face higher local...

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

We investigate whether the flexibility in making contributions towards defined benefit pension plans sponsored by firms in the United States allows managers to save cash and increase investments. Firms invest more at higher levels of pension deficit, defined as pension benefit obligations less...

Accounting research on choices of inventory valuation methods has focused on various consequences of two extreme methods: LIFO and FIFO. The main consequence studies relate to effects of the differences in taxes payable between the two methods on security prices. However, tax consequences appear...

This study analyzes how promotion-based tournament incentives for non-CEO senior executives affect corporate innovation. We measure tournament incentives using the pay gap between a CEO and the next layer of senior executives. We find that tournament incentives are positively related to...

Firms provide compensation incentives to executives, primarily in the form of bonus payments, to alleviate slack in the deployment of corporate resources to working capital. Financially constrained firms are heavy users of working capital incentives. So are firms that are less exposed to...

This paper investigates the impact of managerial compensation on the likelihood of covenant violations and reports that higher CEO risk-shifting incentives significantly increase the likelihood of covenant violations. Evidence suggests that CEOs with creditor unfriendly compensation in leveraged...

We provide new evidence that equity incentives can have perverse effects on firm value. Conditioning the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) incentives and the risk exposure generated by corporate policy decisions on how risk is expected to affect firm value, we find that delta...