Corporate Governance and Managerial Decisions

这个项目将调查公司治理如何影响管理决策的一般问题。上世纪80年代中期，几个州通过了企业合并（BC）立法，为研究企业治理的效果提供了绝佳的机会。通过减少在特定州注册的公司被收购的威胁，这些法律可能会削弱公司治理，围绕这些法律通过的负面股价反应就证明了这一点。不列颠哥伦比亚省法律应该提供更精确的治理变化，而不是通过观察控制权的变化或公司采用收购防御来获得。我们建议在纵向研究数据库和COMPUSTAT之间建立一个匹配，以研究BC法律对一系列管理决策的影响。这些匹配的数据将提供两个优势。首先，它将使我们能够查看在COMPUSTAT资产负债表数据中无法获得的一系列广泛的变量，例如准确的工资和就业信息、生产率、工厂出生率和工厂死亡率。其次，这些数据将使我们能够利用法律的制度特征，并提高我们的识别策略。法律对公司的影响是基于公司的注册状态，而不是公司所在地的状态。通过确定每个工厂的位置状态，我们可以完全控制与BC法律通过同时发生的特定州的经济冲击。换句话说，我们可以对比位于同一州的两家工厂，但其中只有一家属于在立法州成立的公司。因此，由此产生的方法削弱了对法律的政治内生性影响估计的担忧。使用这种方法，我们计划研究四个关键变量：规模、多样化、工资和生产率。这些变量将帮助我们理解三种管理偏好模型的相对重要性：帝国建设、管理惯性和利益相关者保护。我们将从四个方面扩展我们的基本方法。首先，我们将把中央和辅助办公室的数据合并到我们的样本中。这使我们能够检查白领的结果，因为这些工人在LRD中被覆盖得相当少。这一点尤其重要，因为公司的利益相关者保护理论可能会强调管理者对白领工人的更有利待遇。其次，我们计划跟踪样本中每个公司的注册状态变化，这些信息在COMPUSTAT中无法获得。这解决了法律生效后重组所产生的潜在内生性偏见。它还使我们能够考察收购立法是否确实影响了重组，这是确定各州之间在公司监管方面的竞争是否会导致逐底竞争的重要一步。第三，考察不同治理机制的可替代性和互补性。具体来说，我们将测试大股东公司或竞争更激烈的行业对BC立法的通过是否有或多或少的反应。最后，我们将调查这些法律是否影响工资对当地失业的敏感性或投资对q的敏感性。这些最后的结果将有助于确定管理惯性理论的重要性。

This project will investigate the general question of how corporate governance affects managerial decisions. Business Combination (BC) legislation, passed by several states in the mid-80s, provide an excellent opportunity for studying the effects of governance. By reducing the threat of takeovers for firms incorporated in a given state, these laws likely weakened corporate governance, as evidenced by the negative share price reactions surrounding the passage of these laws. BC laws should provide more precise variation in governance than can be obtained by looking at changes in control or firm's adoption of takeover defenses. We propose constructing a match between the Longitudinal Research Database and COMPUSTAT to investigate the effect of BC laws on a set of managerial decisions. This matched data would provide two advantages. First, it would allow us to look at a wide set of variables that are unavailable in the COMPUSTAT balance sheet data, such as accurate wage and employment information, productivity, plant births and plant deaths. Second, this data would allow us to exploit an institutional feature of the laws and sharpen our identification strategy. The laws affected firms based on their state of incorporation and not their state of location. By identifying each plant's state of location, we can fully control for state-specific economic shocks that are contemporaneous with the passage of the BC laws. In other words, we can contrast two plants that are located in the same state but only one of which belongs to a firm incorporated in a legislating state. The resulting methodology therefore weakens concerns that the political endogeneity of the laws biases estimates. Using this methodology, we plan to study four key variables: measures of size, diversification, wages and productivity. These variables will help us understand the relative importance of three models of managerial preferences: empire building, managerial inertia and stakeholder protection. We will extend our basic methodology in four ways. First, we will merge the Central and Auxiliary Offices data to our sample. This allows us to examine white-collar outcomes, since these workers are covered quite poorly in the LRD. This is especially important since stakeholder protection theories of the firm would likely emphasize manager's more favorable treatment of white-collar workers. Second, we plan to track changes in state of incorporation for each of the firms in our sample, information not available in COMPUSTAT. This addresses the potential endogeneity bias arising from reincorporations subsequent to the laws. It also allows us to examine whether takeover legislation did indeed influence reincorporations, an important step in determining whether competition between states in corporate regulation leads to a race to the bottom. Third, we will examine the substitutability and complementarily of different governance mechanisms. Specifically, we will test whether firms with large shareholders or in more competitive industries react more or less to the passage of BC legislation. Finally, we will investigate whether these laws affected the sensitivity of wages to local unemployment or the sensitivity of investment to q. These last results will help determine the importance of managerial inertia theories.