Credit Default Swaps, Agency Problems, and Management Incentives / Jongsub Lee, Junho Oh, David Yermack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Jongsub.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Oh, Junho.

Yermack, David.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24064.

NBER working paper series no. w24064

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

We show in a theoretical model that credit default swaps induce managerial agency problems through two channels: reducing the opportunity for managers to transfer value to equityholders from creditors via strategic default, and reducing the intensity of monitoring by creditors, which leads to greater CEO diversion of assets as perquisites. We further show that boards can use compensation awards that increase managerial performance incentives (delta) and risk-taking incentives (vega) in order to mitigate these two agency problems, with increases in managerial vega being particularly useful to alleviate the strategic default-related agency problem. We study equity compensation awards to CEOs of S&P 1500 companies during 2001-2015 and find that they occur in patterns consistent with these predictions.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2017.