We examine whether executive stock options (ESOs) provide managers with incentives to invest in risky projects. For a sample of oil and gas producers, we examine whether the coefficient of variation of future cash flows from exploration activity (our proxy for exploration risk) increases with the sensitivity of the value of the CEO's options to stock return volatility (ESO risk incentives). Both ESO risk incentives and exploration risk are treated as endogenous variables by adopting a simultaneous equations approach.We find evidence that ESO risk incentives has a positive relation with future exploration risk taking. Additional tests indicate that ESO risk incentives exhibit a negative relation with oil price hedging in a system of equations where ESO risk incentives and hedging are allowed to be endogenously determined. Overall, our results are consistent with ESOs providing managers with incentives to mitigate risk-related incentive problems.
ABSTRACT:We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 corporate tax executives to investigate firms' incentives and disincentives for tax planning. While many researchers hypothesize that reputational concerns affect the degree to which managers engage in tax planning, this hypothesis is difficult to test with archival data. Our survey allows us to investigate reputational influences and indeed we find that reputational concerns are important -69% of executives rate reputation as important and the factor ranks second in order of importance among all factors explaining why firms do not adopt a potential tax planning strategy. We also find that financial accounting incentives play a role. For example, 84% of publicly traded firms respond that top management at their company cares at least as much about the GAAP ETR as they do about cash taxes paid and 57% of public firms say that increasing earnings per share is an important outcome from a tax planning strategy.
We investigate the association between financial constraints and cash savings generated through tax planning. We predict that an increase in financial constraints leads firms to increase internally generated funds via tax planning. We measure financial constraints based on changes in firm-specific and macroeconomic measures. We find that firms facing increases in financial constraints exhibit increases in cash tax planning. Our results indicate that among profitable firms, firm-years with the largest increases in firm-specific constraints are associated with declines in firms' cash effective tax rates ranging from 3.00 to 5.14 percent, which equate to between 2.87 and 4.82 percent of operating cash flows. We also find that (1) the impact of financial constraints on tax planning is greatest among firms with low cash reserves, and (2) constrained firms achieve a substantial portion of their current tax savings via deferral-based tax planning strategies, despite the lack of a financial statement benefit.
JEL Classifications: E69; H25; H60.
Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources identified in the paper.
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