Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/18687 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 1322
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Incentive compensation induces correlation between the portfolio of managers and the cash flow of the firms they manage. This correlation exposes managers to risk and hence gives them an incentive to hedge against the poor performance of their firms. We study the agency problem between shareholders and a manager when the manager can hedge his incentive compensation using financial markets and shareholders cannot perfectly monitor the manager's portfolio in order to keep him from hedging the risk in his compensation. In particular, shareholders can monitor the manager's portfolio stochastically, and since monitoring is costly governance is imperfect. If managerial hedging is detected, shareholders can seize the payoffs of the manager's trades. We show that at the optimal contract: (i) the manager's portfolio is monitored only when the firm performs poorly, (ii) the more costly monitoring is, the more sensitive is the manager's compensation to firm performance, and (iii) conditional on the firm's performance, the manager's compensation is lower when his portfolio is monitored, even if no hedging is revealed by monitoring.
Subjects: 
executive compensation
incentives
monitoring
corporate governance
JEL: 
G30
D82
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.