Incentive | EPFL Graph Search

In general, incentives are anything that persuade a person to alter their behaviour in the desired manner. It is emphasised that incentives matter by the basic law of economists and the laws of behaviour, which state that higher incentives amount to greater levels of effort and therefore higher levels of performance. Divisions An incentive is a powerful tool to influence certain desired behaviors or action often adopted by governments and businesses. Incentives can be broadly broken down into two categories: intrinsic incentives and extrinsic incentives. Overall, both types of incentives can be powerful tools often employ to increase effort and higher performance according to the "law of behavior." Incentives are most studied in the area of personnel economics where economic analysts, such as those who take part in human resources management practices, focus on how firms make employees more motivated, through pay and career concerns, compensation and performance evaluation

Another Hidden Cost of Incentives: The Detrimental Effect on Norm Enforcement

Stephan Meier

Monetary incentives, such as subsidies or bonuses, are often considered as a way to foster contributions to public goods in society and firms. This paper investigates experimentally the effect of private contribution incentives in the presence of a norm enforcement mechanism. Norm enforcement through peer punishment has been shown to be effective in raising contributions by itself. We test whether and how (centrally provided) private incentives interact with (decentralized) punishment, both of which affect subjects’ monetary payoffs. The results of our experiment show that private incentives for contributors can reduce the effectiveness of the norm enforcement mechanism: Free riders are punished less harshly in the treatment with incentives, and as a consequence, average contributions to the public good are no higher than without incentives. This finding ties to and extends previous research on settings in which monetary incentives may fail to have the desired effect.

2010

Essays in Financial Economics

Kornelia Fabisik

This thesis consists of three parts that study separate subjects in corporate finance and corporate governance. The overarching theme is ownership by CEOs and other insiders. In the first part, which is co-authored work with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, René M. Stulz, and Jerôme Taillard, we build the largest database of managerial ownership information ever used in the literature. We show that the empirical relation between a firm's Tobin's q and managerial ownership is systematically negative. When we restrict our sample to larger firms as in the prior literature, we confirm earlier findings of an increasing and concave relation between Tobin's q and managerial ownership. We show that cumulative past performance and liquidity can explain these seemingly contradictory results. Better performing firms have more liquid equity, which enables firms and insiders to more easily sell shares after the IPO, and they also have a higher Tobin's q. In the second part, I conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of the pledging phenomenon among U.S. CEOs. Pledging allows the owner of shares to put them up as collateral to a third party in exchange for cash. I show that between 2007 and 2016, 7.6% of publicly listed U.S. firms disclosed that their CEOs had pledged company stock as collateral for a loan. On average, CEOs pledge 38% of their shares. The mean loan value is an economically sizeable $65 million. CEOs use the funds to either double down (6.0%), hedge their ownership (3.5%), or to obtain liquidity while maintaining ownership (90.5%). My event study results reveal that stock market participants view pledging as value-enhancing. Similarly, I find no evidence of its negative shareholder value consequences, except for CEOs who engage in significant pledging. In the third part, I provide the first in-depth analysis of U.S. pledging CEOs who faced margin calls. A margin call occurs whenever the value of collateral backing a loan falls below a certain pre-specified amount. I find that 15% of CEOs with margin loans have at some point faced margin-call-induced selling. The mean (median) drop in CEO ownership following margin-call-induced sales is 31.2% (22.0%). More than 87% of firms do not introduce any type of an anti-pledging policy post margin-call sales by their CEOs which could explain the absence of any major changes in CEO compensation contracts. Corporate policies in firms with CEOs who lost a sizeable ownership stake are not indicative of weakened incentives.

EPFL2020

Essays in Banking and Financial Regulation

Susanne Johanna Petronella Léonie Vissers

This thesis examines how banks choose their optimal capital structure and cash reserves in the presence of regulatory measures. The first chapter, titled Bank Capital Structure and Tail Risk, presents a bank capital structure model in which bank assets are subject to both diffusion and tail risk. Of these two types of risk, tail risk causes uninsured deposits to be risky, as the bank's asset value can unexpectedly fall below the value of deposits in case of default. The model shows that tail risk, rather than diffusion risk, is the main driver of the risk on deposits when the bank is unregulated and of the endogenous deposit insurance premium when the bank is regulated. Keeping total volatility constant, the model shows that a high tail risk component leads to higher credit spreads, default risk, and magnitude of bank losses in default than a high diffusion risk component.The second chapter, titled Bank Regulation and Market Discipline in the Presence of Risk-Taking Incentives, presents a bank capital structure model in which equity holders can increase asset risk once debt is in place. I study the effects of capital requirements and subsidized deposit insurance on the bank's privately optimal funding and operational risk level. The model predicts that there are synergetic effects of regulation and market discipline. When the regulator sets the capital charge and deposit insurance premium payments sufficiently high for a risky portfolio, the bank commits to the low-risk asset portfolio by setting a lower leverage ratio and substituting market debt for deposits. This market discipline effect disappears when the regulatory costs become too high. In the third chapter that is titled Dividend Restrictions and Asymmetric Information, we develop a dynamic model of a bank whose management has superior information about the impact of a pending shock to the bank's cash holdings and can signal the bank's type through its dividend policy. Banks that will be adversely affected by the shock have incentives to pool with unaffected banks to increase their market value. To avoid being mimicked, the unaffected banks can credibly signal via a more aggressive payout strategy. Dividend payout restrictions have the potential to prevent a separating equilibrium from forming. This leads to the bad type adopting a more aggressive payout policy with a higher risk of default but mitigates the distortion of the good type's policy. We identify a number of scenarios where this trade-off presents an opportunity for regulatory intervention and some where it does not.