Essays On Contract Design And Incentive Provision

Contract theory, which emphasizes the importance of unverifiable actions and private information, has been a highly active field of research in microeconomics in the last decades. This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I consists of three chapters that study contract-theoretic models which are motivated by the classic procurement problem of a principal who wants an agent to deliver a certain good or service. In such models it is typically assumed that decision makers are interested in their own monetary payoffs only. Moreover, they have unlimited cognitive abilities and behave in a perfectly rational way. Yet, in practice people often do not behave this way. While empirical research is very difficult in contract theory, laboratory experiments have recently turned out to be an important source of data. In Part II, three experimental studies are presented that investigate contract-theoretic problems brought up in Part I.

This dissertation comprises three papers on the governance of corporate risk: 1. The first paper investigates the role of organizational structures aimed at monitoring corporate risk. Proponents of risk-related governance structures, such as risk committees or Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) programs, assert that risk monitoring adds value by ensuring that corporate risks are managed. An alternative view is that such governance structures are nothing more than window-dressing created in response to regulatory or public pressure. Consistent with the former view, I find that, in the period between 2000 and 2006, firms with more observable risk oversight structures exhibit lower equity and credit risk than firms with fewer or no observable risk oversight structures. I also provide evidence that firms with more observable risk oversight structures experienced higher returns during the worst days of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and were less susceptible to market fluctuations than firms with fewer or no observable risk oversight structures. Finally, I find that firms without observable risk oversight structures experienced higher abnormal returns to recent legislative events relating to risk management than firms with observable risk oversight structures. 2. The most common empirical measure of managerial risk-taking incentives is equity portfolio vega (Vega), which is measured as the dollar change in a manager's equity portfolio for a 0.01 change in the standard deviation of stock returns. However, Vega exhibits at least three undesirable features. First, Vega is expressed as a dollar change. This implicitly assumes that managers with identical Vega have the same incentives regardless of differences in their total equity and other wealth. Second, the small change in the standard deviation of returns used to calculate Vega (i.e., 0.01) yields a very local approximation of managerial risk-taking incentives. If an executive's expected payoff is highly nonlinear over the range of potential stock price and volatility outcomes, a local measure of incentives is unlikely to provide a valid assessment of managerial incentives. Third, Vega is measured as the partial derivative of the manager's equity portfolio with respect to return volatility. This computation does not consider that this partial derivative also varies with changes in stock price. The second paper develops and tests a new measure of managerial risk-taking equity incentives that adjusts for differences in managerial wealth, considers more global changes in price and volatility, and explicitly considers the impact of stock price and volatility changes. We find that our new measure exhibits higher explanatory power and is more robust to model specification than Vegafor explaining a wide range of measures of risk-taking behavior. 3. The third paper examines the relation between shareholder monitoring and managerial risk-taking incentives. We develop a stylized model to show that shareholder monitoring mitigates the effect of contractual risk-taking incentives on the manager's actions. Consistent with the model, we find empirically that the positive association between the CEO's contractual risk-taking incentives and risk-taking behavior decreases with the level of shareholder monitoring. Furthermore, consistent with the board anticipating and optimally responding to shareholder monitoring, boards of firms exposed to more intense monitoring design compensation contracts that provide higher incentives to take risks. Overall, our results suggest that, when evaluating risk-taking incentives provided by a compensation contract, it is important to account for the firm's monitoring environment.

This report will be of interest to state and local highway agency construction managers and contractors with regard to learning about best practices of time-related incentive and disincentive contract provisions and their effect on staffing levels, productivity, project cost, quality, contract administration, and the contractor's operations and innovations. The report also presents a decision process guide to use as a template for crafting the incentive/disincentive provisions.

The 1986 article by Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver D. Hart titled "A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration" has provided a framework for understanding how firm boundaries are defined and how they affect economic performance. The property rights approach has provided a formal way to introduce incomplete contracting ideas into economic modeling. The Impact of Incomplete Contracts on Economics collects papers and opinion pieces on the impact that this property right approach to the firm has had on the economics profession.