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This study investigates the impact of bank CEOs’ inside debt on shareholder benefits in the context of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) before the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

Employing an event-study methodology, this analysis delves into market reactions to bank M&A announcements during 2006–2007, encompassing 105 M&As by 79 public commercial banks. This era witnessed heightened risk-taking behavior on the verge of the financial crisis. We explore the relation between relative inside debt and market abnormal returns at M&A announcements and the association between relative inside debt and cash payment preferences in M&As.

Evidence suggests that M&A announcements from banks where acquiring CEOs hold a substantial inside debt experience favorable stock market reaction, particularly for smaller banks. Additionally, banks with elevated CEO inside debt tend to favor cash as a payment mode for M&As.

One limitation of this study is the short period of data availability. The data used in this study covers only 2006 and 2007, the periods marked by notable risk-taking activities on the verge of the financial crisis. Although this period is perfectly suitable for our investigation, given the prevalence of conflicts between equity and debt holders, it is essential to acknowledge that our findings may not capture changes or trends over time. Nevertheless, the results offer valuable insights into the factors that influence the behavior of the studied population. Future research could employ a longitudinal design to address this limitation and gain a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics over extended periods.

Our study has significant implications for businesses and policymakers as it provides insights into the factors contributing to financial crises and how compensation mechanisms can be used to moderate bank risk-taking. We propose that CEO inside debt compensation presents a plausible mechanism that boards of directors can incorporate into bank executive compensation contracts. By doing so, they can promote value-enhancing investments and moderate excessive risk-taking, thereby safeguarding the financial stability of individual banks and overall financial system.

Our study sheds light on the beneficial role of bank CEO inside debt for shareholders, contributing empirical backing to the conflict resolution viewpoint in the discourse on wealth appropriation. From a regulatory stance, our findings advocate for the inclusion of bank CEO inside debt in executive remuneration agreements. Such a strategy can empower boards of directors to mitigate undue risk and enhance shareholder value in M&As, safeguarding both individual bank and broader financial system stability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CEOs' inside debt holdings (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage of the firms they manage, with the aim to examine whether CEO incentives play a role in corporate risk-taking.

The authors investigate the relation between CEO inside debt holdings (CIDH) (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage (DOL) of the firms they manage. Using a sample of 11,145 US firm-year observations over the period 2006–2017, the authors find a strong negative association between CIDH and DOL. Additional analyses reveal that the relationship between CIDH and DOL is more pronounced in firms with heightened agency issues, powerful CEOs and for CEOs with stronger professional networks. The results are robust to various sensitivity and endogeneity tests.

The authors find strong evidence confirming the expected negative association between CEO inside debt and DOL suggesting that firms with higher inside debt tend to maintain lower levels of operating leverage. These findings continue to hold with the alternative measure for the inside debt and operating leverage, and across a range of tests designed to rule out the possibility that the primary findings are in any way driven by potential endogeneity. In addition, the findings demonstrate that the presence of manager-shareholder agency conflicts can strengthen the inside debt–DOL relationship suggesting the strong role of inside debt in reducing firm risk.

Findings in this paper have implications for design of compensation structures so that corporate boards can establish incentives as a tool for risk management. A limitation of this study is that it is focused on one market, i.e. US listed companies, so the findings may not be applicable on a global scale.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that links firm-level management of operating leverage through design of CEO inside debt incentives (two obvious choices for risk-reduction at the CEOs’ disposal include reducing financial risk through reduction of firm leverage and reducing operating risk through reduction of operating leverage). While use of firm leverage as an instrument of choice has been explored in the past, use of operating leverage to achieve risk reduction when CEO possess high inside holding, has received very little attention.

Corporate governance scholars have built on agency theory premises to document chief executive officers' (CEOs’) debt-based compensation, also known as inside debt, as an effective tool to control excessive risk and deter risky corporate strategies. In this study, the authors draw on behavioral agency model to put these well-established assumptions to the test in a different setting and argue for the context-specific effects of CEOs' long-term compensation.

Focusing on corporate mergers and acquisitions in a post-crisis period (2011–2017), the authors cast doubt on agency theory predictions on debt-like compensation, point to the more realistic assumptions of behavioral decision models, and call for more contingency approaches in theoretical arguments.

An analysis of more than 4000 observations reveals that neither CEOs nor shareholders react significantly to inside debt after the economy recovers. Firm risk is also influenced only marginally by long-term compensation in a normal period of time.

While extant literature is rather unanimous on risk-reducing impact of inside debt, the study periods span the financial crisis of 2007. This research is the first conducted in regular times to demonstrate that previous findings are biased and heavily influenced by an exogenous shock.

Digital transformation is essential for commercial banks to maintain long-term competitiveness in the digital economy era. This study aims to investigate the relationship between inside debt and the bank's digital transformation.

This study set up a quasi-natural experiment based on implementing the executive compensation deferral system in the Chinese banking industry. Using the annual panel data of 180 commercial banks in China from 2007 to 2021, this study employed the difference-in-differences (DID) method to conduct an empirical analysis.

This study confirms a significant statistical relationship between inside debt and the bank's digital transformation, and managerial myopia is the transmission channel of inside debt affecting the bank's digital transformation. Furthermore, the development of Internet finance and the enhancement of bankers' confidence will improve the contributions of inside debt to the bank's digital transformation.

This study contributes to the literature on inside debt and the bank's digital transformation. It has specific policy value for the scientific design of the banking compensation mechanism and accelerating banks' digital transformation.

This paper contributes to the literature as follows. First, it examines if option and stock compensations raise creditor's risk, and which one is more important than the other. Second, it explores if CEO's compensation interacts with CEO overconfidence to raise creditor's risk. Third, it investigates how banks use different loan terms to alleviate their credit risk.

This study used advanced regression analysis and use of generalized methods of moment methodology.

The results show that option compensation is more important than stock compensation in raising credit risk; option compensation interacts with CEO overconfidence, giving rise to a much higher credit risk; and covenant usage is more important than other loan contract terms in mitigating credit risk given that covenant use could not be substituted away by using other loan contract terms such as increasing interest rate, reducing principal or shortening loan duration. This paper has practical implications for credit markets.

The main implication is that hand-collect data are available up to 2010.

It informs creditors the potential sources of loan risk emanating from option rather than stock incentives; it informs creditors that option incentive interacts with CEO overconfidence rendering the credit risk bigger than expected, and it informs creditors the importance of using covenants vis-à-vis other loan contract terms for mitigating compensation and overconfidence risk.

Banks are alerted to the risk due to the interaction between overconfidence and compensations, implying that overconfident managers remunerated with options compensations are more risky than overconfident managers who are not remunerated as such.

This paper is original: (1) The authors show that option compensation is more risky than stock compensation from viewpoint of creditors. This has not been assessed. (2) Interaction between managerial compensation and managerial overconfidence has not been assessed before. (3) Use of different loan contract terms to alleviate risk from overconfident managers (who are prone to over investment but who are innovative according to the literature) has not been evaluated.

Remuneration policies may differ from country to country, and their effect on bank stability could be due to the legal framework. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the legal system impacts the relationship between CEO compensation and bank stability across countries.

To test the study hypotheses, the authors use panel data of 74 banks operating in ten OECD countries during the period 2009–2016 and apply the generalized moments method regression model to better remediate the endogeneity problem.

The findings confirm that a country’s banking regulations significantly affect its bank stability. Common law countries have less bank stability than civil law countries. This result can be interpreted by the fact that, in common-law countries, banks’ CEO are strongly protected by the law, so they allocate a large part of bank assets to risky loans to improve their variable remuneration.

The research can help policymakers understand bank stability in one country. Any legal reform would require prior knowledge of how risk-taking may arise in executive compensation.

The contribution is to explain the controversial effect of executive compensation on bank stability in the framework of legal theory. The authors argue that regulators should monitor compensation structures and that the country’s legal origin of law shapes the CEO compensation structure and is a determinant of bank stability. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies exploring this field. So, this study tries to shed more light on the dark side of CEOs’ behavior when undertaking risky projects to maximize their remuneration.

This paper aims to examine the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) attributes on foreign shareholdings from the perspective of an emerging economy.

This study examined Bombay Stock Exchange listed firms from the Indian stock market and applied a balanced panel data approach with fixed effect estimation technique during the period 2010–2019.

The study shows that CEOs’ financial education and a higher level of education positively affect foreign shareholdings. The age and experience of CEO have a positive and significant impact on foreign shareholdings. Firms with male CEOs are preferred more by foreign investors. The effect of CEO busyness and CEO duality is negative on foreign shareholdings. Foreign investors prefer to invest in firms with foreign nationality CEOs. Furthermore, the robustness test reveals that the influence of CEO attributes on foreign shareholdings is stronger for new, small and stand-alone firms than for old, large and group-affiliated firms.

The study will be beneficial for a diverse audience ranging from firms’ board of directors, regulators and policymakers who are entrusted with the CEO recruitment process. Additionally, firms seeking external financing should disclose CEO information adequately and improve the reporting quality to attract foreign investors, as they consider CEO characteristics as a valuable signal before making investment decisions.

In light of the current legislative reforms, this study can be recognized as one of the early studies that explore the relationship between CEO attributes and foreign shareholdings in the context of an emerging economy.

The authors extend the recent research using the risk component of human resource’s (HR’s) compensation plans to examine the effects of risk components on two strategic outcomes: within-firm temporal change, or strategic variation, and firm strategic divergence from the industry, or strategic deviation. In addition, the authors examine the role of previous financial performance as a boundary moderator condition of the effects of risk components in the compensation plan and firm strategic outcomes.

To examine the effects of low- and high-risk components of executive compensation on strategic variation and deviation over time, the authors collected data from 2,510 companies listed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 index in a panel data format of a 12-year period. The authors gathered financial and other firm-level data from COMPUSTAT, and executive compensation and executive-level data from ExecuComp.

The findings support the main effects of risk components on strategic change, while both high- and low-risk components act on strategic deviation contingent on the moderating role of total shareholder return (TSR). In the theoretical framework, the authors test the moderating role of total shareholder return (TSR) as a boundary condition of the effects of risk components in the compensation plan. In doing so, the authors provide a fine-grained understanding of the influence of compensation plan risk components on outcomes proximal to executives, such as the maintenance of the status quo and the search for financial gains.

New studies can explore a three-way moderating effect on performance indicators, such as TSR, Tobin’s Q and return on asset. The authors addressed this limitation and did a comparative analysis, but the authors did not include additional moderating mechanisms in these interactive effects.

By disaggregating the executive’s compensation based on the risk components, boards of directors can mitigate any possible unwanted biases in the relationship between principal and agent.

By considering the influence of both low- and high-risk components of compensation plans on strategic outcomes –instead of firm performance – this study expands strategy literature supporting the influence of compensation schema on a firm’s outcomes. This path is new because it offers a moderating perspective to understand the strategic deviations and changes that chief executive officers imprint in their firms.

Los autores amplían la investigación reciente usando el componente de riesgo de los planes de compensación de RH para examinar los efectos de los componentes de riesgo en dos resultados estratégicos: cambio temporal dentro de la empresa, o variación estratégica, y divergencia estratégica de la empresa de la industria, o desviación estratégica. Además, examinamos el papel del desempeño financiero anterior como una condición moderadora límite de los efectos de los componentes de riesgo en el plan de compensación y los resultados estratégicos de la empresa.

Para examinar los efectos de los componentes de alto y bajo riesgo de la compensación ejecutiva en la variación y desviación estratégica a lo largo del tiempo, recopilamos datos de 2510 empresas que figuran en el índice Standard & Poor's 500 en un formato de datos de panel de un período de 12 años. Los autores recopilaron datos financieros y de otro tipo a nivel de empresa de COMPUSTAT, y compensación de ejecutivos, y datos a nivel ejecutivo de EXECUCOMP.

Nuestros hallazgos respaldan los efectos principales de los componentes de riesgo en el cambio estratégico, mientras que los componentes de alto y bajo riesgo actúan sobre la desviación estratégica dependiendo del papel moderador del rendimiento total del accionista. En el marco teórico, los autores prueban el papel moderador del Retorno Total del Accionista como condición límite de los efectos de los componentes de riesgo en el plan de compensación. Al hacerlo, brindamos una comprensión detallada de la influencia de los componentes de riesgo del plan de compensación en los resultados próximos a los ejecutivos, como el mantenimiento del statu quo y la búsqueda de ganancias financieras.

al considerar la influencia de los componentes de bajo y alto riesgo de los planes de compensación en los resultados estratégicos, en lugar del desempeño de la empresa, este estudio amplía la literatura de estrategia que respalda la influencia del esquema de compensación en los resultados de una empresa. Este camino es nuevo porque ofrece una perspectiva moderadora para entender las desviaciones y cambios estratégicos que los CEOs imprimen en sus firmas.

los nuevos estudios pueden explorar un efecto moderador de tres vías en los indicadores de rendimiento, como TSR, Tobin's Q y ROA. Abordamos esta limitación e hicimos un análisis comparativo, pero no incluimos mecanismos moderadores adicionales en estos efectos interactivos.

al desagregar la compensación del ejecutivo en función de los componentes de riesgo, las juntas directivas pueden mitigar cualquier posible sesgo no deseado en la relación entre el principal y el agente.

Os autores estendem a pesquisa recente usando o componente de risco dos planos de remuneração de RH para examinar os efeitos dos componentes de risco em dois resultados estratégicos: mudança temporal dentro da empresa, ou variação estratégica, e divergência estratégica da empresa do setor, ou desvio estratégico. Além disso, examinamos o papel do desempenho financeiro anterior como uma condição moderadora dos efeitos dos componentes de risco no plano de remuneração e nos resultados estratégicos da empresa.

Para examinar os efeitos dos componentes de baixo e alto risco da remuneração executiva na variação e desvio estratégico ao longo do tempo, coletamos dados de 2.510 empresas listadas no índice Standard & Poor's 500 em um formato de dados de painel de um período de 12 anos. Os autores coletaram dados financeiros e de outros níveis da empresa da COMPUSTAT, remuneração executiva e dados de nível executivo da EXECUCOMP.

Nossos resultados suportam os principais efeitos dos componentes de risco na mudança estratégica, enquanto os componentes de alto e baixo risco atuam no desvio estratégico contingente ao papel moderador do Retorno Total ao Acionista. No referencial teórico, os autores testam o papel moderador do Total Shareholder Return como condição limite dos efeitos dos componentes de risco no plano de remuneração. Ao fazer isso, fornecemos uma compreensão refinada da influência dos componentes de risco do plano de remuneração nos resultados próximos aos executivos, como a manutenção do status quo e a busca por ganhos financeiros.

ao considerar a influência dos componentes de baixo e alto risco dos planos de remuneração nos resultados estratégicos -em vez do desempenho da empresa- este estudo expande a literatura de estratégia que apoia a influência do esquema de remuneração nos resultados de uma empresa. Esse caminho é novo porque oferece uma perspectiva moderadora para entender os desvios e mudanças estratégicas que os CEOs imprimem em suas empresas.

Novos estudos podem explorar um efeito moderador de três vias em indicadores de desempenho, como TSR, Q de Tobin e ROA. Abordamos essa limitação e fizemos uma análise comparativa, mas não incluímos mecanismos moderadores adicionais nesses efeitos interativos.

Ao desagregar a remuneração do executivo com base nos componentes de risco, os conselhos de administração podem mitigar possíveis vieses indesejados na relação entre principal e agente.

The main purpose of this paper is to look at the link between chief executive officer (CEO) behavior and corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement with the moderating role of bank risk-taking behavior.

Based on a 13-year data set (2007–2019), the authors applied the feasible generalized least squares with panel data to test the hypotheses.

The findings reveal a positive and significant link between CEO behavior and CSR engagement. Based on these findings, it can be argued that the characteristics of the CEO of the banks would improve the CSR strategies. Furthermore, the study suggests a moderating effect of bank risk-taking in the link between psychological bias and corporate social responsibility engagement (CSR engagement).

As CEO behavioral characteristics are essential to understanding CSR practice, boards of directors should consider the behavioral traits of dominant and overconfident CEOs while designing CSR practices.

If the bank behaves in a socially responsible manner, direct and indirect stakeholders may be able to evaluate the level of risk-taking in more detail.

This research highlights the importance of CEO behavior characteristics for CSR, which is a crucial application that supports the upper echelons theory; and fills a gap in literature research. It is one of the few studies examining the interaction between risk-taking, CEO behavior and CSR engagement.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity (BoGD) and risk-taking by property-liability (P-L) stock insurers from an analytical framework that control for organizational form and ownership structure. It relies on the behavioral agency model, the resource dependency theory and the concept of socioemotional wealth (SEW).

This study builds on an unbalanced panel of 2,285 firm-year observations from 232 European and US P-L stock insurers covering the period 2010–2019 and measure risk-taking by using four proxies: total risk (TR), upside risk (UpR), downside risk (DwR) and default risk (DR). Reverse causality and endogeneity concerns are treated by applying different approaches.

Findings suggest that BoGD mitigates the TR, DwR and DR but does not interfere with the UpR, which conceptualizes firm expectations to enhance patrimony and safeguard SEW for heirs, especially in family-owned insurers. The findings hold in various robustness checks including endogeneity and alternative specifications of BoGD and risk-taking.

This study contributes to practice by contrasting the role of female directors’ bevahior when assuming risk, which seems significantly different depending on the risk-taking specification and the organizational form. The author advises policyholders and policymakers to look at closely on BoGD and ownership structure as they affect insurance company risk-taking.

This study takes a more direct approach to highlight the BoGD’s effect on corporate risk-taking by focusing on the insurance sector which is characterized by risk and uncertainty bearing. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider the full range of the stock organizational forms and the degree of family control in displaying this effect in both widely traded and closely traded insurers and to assess risk-taking from both market-based and accounting-based aspects.