Managerial Decision Horizon, Executive Compensation, and Corporate Governance

Abstract

Managers have shorter investment horizons than well-diversified shareholders for various reasons such as the threat of managerial turnover arising from takeovers, risk aversion, liquidity constraints, and the need to access capital markets. Such myopic managerial behaviors are affected by various factors including monetary incentives and internal/external monitoring by board of directors or active shareholders. In this dissertation, I first provide empirical evidence that myopic behaviors of managers are affected by their compensation structure. Using a sample of 23,107 firm-year observations from 1993-2014 for firms in the S&P 1500 index, I show that the asymmetric cost behavior called cost stickiness is 1) weaker when CEOs are compensated relatively more in the form of annual cash bonus, and 2) stronger when they receive relatively more long-term compensation. I also show that the magnitude of analysts’ earnings forecast bias created by cost stickiness also decreases with CEO’s short-term cash bonus and increases with long-term compensation. Next, I show how corporate governance affects managerial decision horizon directly and indirectly through executive compensation. Using a sample of 7,639 firm-year observations from 1999-2011 for firms in the S&P 1500 index, I show that board characteristics such as board independence and CEO-chairman separation induce more R&D investments not only directly but also indirectly by encouraging more use of long-term compensation and thus extending managerial decision horizon.