Chitru S. Fernando, William L. Megginson, Anthony D. May
{"title":"Are investment banks special too? Evidence on relationship-specific capital in investment bank services","authors":"Chitru S. Fernando, William L. Megginson, Anthony D. May","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12655","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"37 1","pages":"23-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gabriele Lattanzio, Lubomir P. Litov, William L. Megginson, Alina Munteanu
{"title":"Capitalizing entrepreneurship: The rise of growth equity","authors":"Gabriele Lattanzio, Lubomir P. Litov, William L. Megginson, Alina Munteanu","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12647","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"37 1","pages":"8-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The financial and economic lessons of Italy's privatization program","authors":"William L. Megginson, Dario Scannapieco","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12646","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"37 1","pages":"106-116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
William L. Megginson, Robert C. Nash, Matthias van Randenborgh
{"title":"The record on privatization","authors":"William L. Megginson, Robert C. Nash, Matthias van Randenborgh","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12645","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"37 1","pages":"36-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CEO bonus plans—And how to fix them","authors":"Kevin J. Murphy, Michael C. Jensen","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12629","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Our research and consulting experience leads us to conclude that almost all CEO and executive bonus plans are deeply flawed and contribute to highly counterproductive incentives and actions that end up reducing the long-run value of most companies.</p><p>Ultimately, however, the advantages of bonus-based reward plans are only going to be as good and as effective as the designers of those plans make them. While bonus plans can be structured to provide incentives focused on specific operational objectives that will lead to value creation, poorly designed plans can provide strong incentives to destroy rather than create value. For example, annual bonus plans can destroy value by providing incentives to withhold effort, shift earnings and cash flow unproductively from one period to another, and to manipulate earnings counterproductively in other ways. Bonus plans also often create incentives for the organization to destroy information critical to the effective coordination of disparate parts of large complex firms. More importantly, bonus plans too often reward participants for misrepresenting—or “lying about”—the profit potential of their business units. All of these diminish the opportunity for performance in an organization, thereby leading to the destruction of firm value.</p><p>In this paper, we describe many of the problems associated with traditional executive bonus plans and offer our suggestions for how these plans can be vastly improved. We proceed as follows. In the section “How Executive Bonus Plans Cause Problems: Overview,” we describe typical bonus plans and provide an overview of the potential problems. In the next three sections, we then discuss problems (and solutions) associated with “Using the Wrong Pay-Performance Relations,” “Using the Wrong Targets, Benchmarks, or Standards,” and “Using the Wrong Performance Measures.” In the section “Failure to Make Ex Post Adjustments to Performance Measures and Compensation,” we discuss ex post adjustments to bonuses (including subjective assessments and claw backs). In the section “Bankers' Bonuses and the Financial Crisis,” we discuss the role of banking bonuses and the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The Conclusion section summarizes our recommendations.</p><p>Figure 1 illustrates these basic components of a “typical” annual bonus plan. Under the typical plan, no bonus is paid until a lower performance threshold or hurdle is achieved, and a “hurdle bonus” is paid at this lower performance threshold. The bonus is usually capped at an upper performance threshold; after this point increased performance is not associated with an increase in the bonus. The thresholds are routinely determined by the firm's annual budgeting process. The range between the lower and upper-performance thresholds (labeled the “incentive zone” in the figure), is drawn as linear but could be convex (bowl-shaped) or concave (upside-down bowl-shaped). The “pay-performance relation” (denoted by the heavy line) is the func","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"95-110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jacf.12629","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CEO incentives—It's not how much you pay, but how","authors":"Michael C. Jensen, Kevin J. Murphy","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12621","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"80-91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Just say no to Wall Street: Putting a stop to the earnings Game","authors":"Joseph Fuller, Michael C. Jensen","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12622","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"75-79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Value maximization, stakeholder theory, and the corporate objective function","authors":"Michael C. Jensen","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12627","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"41-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Active investors, LBOs, and the privatization of bankruptcy","authors":"Michael Jensen","doi":"10.1111/jacf.12623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12623","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46789,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Corporate Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"67-74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}