Integrated ownership and managerial incentives with endogenous project risk

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Baldenius, Tim; Michaeli, Beatrice
• 署名单位: Columbia University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ACCOUNTING STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1380-6653
• DOI: 10.1007/s11142-019-09504-0
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1450-1485
• 关键词: Vertical Integration; performance-measures; firm; determinants

摘要

Integrated ownership is often seen as a way to foster specific investments. However, even in integrated firms, managers invest to maximize their compensation, which is chiefly driven by divisional income. Thus it is not clear that integration has any effect on investments in a world of decentralized decision-making. Building on recent findings that efficiency-enhancing investments raise not only the expected value of a project but also its variance, we show that, under plausible conditions, integration calls for low-powered incentive contracts: the managers invest more as they are less exposed to the investment-related (endogenous) risk, and the principal of an integrated firm has more to gain from greater investment. On the other hand, integration may result in higher-powered incentives if the project is inherently very risky or if the project-specific input is personally costly to the managers (rather than a monetary investment). The qualitative takeaway remains, however, that the contract adjustments under integration mitigate any input distortions present under non-integration. We also allow for firmwide performance evaluation under integration and show that it may lead to larger input distortions, but those are outweighed by improved risk sharing.