报告1：Political Connections and Judicial Bias: Evidence from Chinese Corporate Litigations
报告人：Chenying Zhang (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
时间：2012年2月17日（周五）9:00-10:10am
所在：伟易博新楼217课堂
摘要：Using hand-collected data from 3,323 court rulings on Chinese listed firms during 1998-2010, we investigate how political connections affect litigation outcomes. Connected firms have a win rate that is 8.6% higher than unconnected firms have. The higher win rate is most significant in cases with straightforward facts, in provinces where the local legal institutions are weak, and in cases tried in politically-connected firms' home provinces. The empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the difference in the win rates is caused by judicial bias, but not caused by information asymmetry about case merits. We show that trial outcomes have real wealth impacts on firms' shareholder values. Winning firms earn 5-day cumulative abnormal returns around the verdict announcements that are 50 basis points higher than losing firms earn.
报告2：Relative Wealth Concerns and Executive Compensation
报告人：Qi Liu (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
时间：2012年2月17日（周五）10:20-11:30am
所在：伟易博新楼217课堂
摘要：Empirical studies find that relative wealth concerns (RWCs) affect CEO compensation. In this paper, I incorporate RWCs into a standard principal-agent model and study the implications on CEO compensation. I first study the case in which a CEO's effort increases firm value without changing firm risk. In this case, RWCs will result in an increase in CEO incentives. This effect is larger if aggregate risk is higher, so RWCs can lead to a positive relation between CEO incentives and aggregate risk. CEOs with RWCs willingly risk exposure to aggregate shock to keep up with their peers. This help to reduce risk premium paid to the CEOs. As a result, RWCs can be beneficial to shareholders' payoffs. I also provide a simple explanation
for the pay-for-luck puzzle. I next examine the case in which the CEO's effort affects both the mean and variance of firm value. I show that RWCs provide incentives for a CEO to take risk; thus if a firm's compensation policy has a large influence on other CEOs' risk-taking actions, then low (risk-taking) incentives can be optimal. Lastly, I show that RWCs render options preferable to stock where aggregate risk is much larger than idiosyncratic risk.
