Executive Compensation and Horizon Incentives: an Empirical Investigation

This paper investigates the hypothesis that CEOs in their final years of office manage discretionary investment expenditures to improve short-term earnings performance. We examine the behavior of R & D expenditures for a sample of firms in industries that have significant ongoing R & D activ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: HUANG, Sheng
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/4242
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the hypothesis that CEOs in their final years of office manage discretionary investment expenditures to improve short-term earnings performance. We examine the behavior of R & D expenditures for a sample of firms in industries that have significant ongoing R & D activities. The results suggest that CEOs spend less on R & D during their final years in office. However, we find the reductions in R & D expenditures are mitigated through CEO stock ownership. There is no evidence that the reduced R & D expenditures are associated with either poor firm performance or reductions in investment expenditures that are capitalized for accounting purposes.