Accounting Review, NOV 2018
动态机构环境中先行指标变量和管理激励
作者：Fan Qintao (Univ Oregon, Lundquist Coll Business)
Li Wei (Univ Illinois, Gies Coll Business)
摘要：本文在动态代理的设定下，研究了企业未来财务绩效的先行指标如何影响激励和合同效率。在我们的两期模型中，先行指标变量提供了对经理长期努力下不确定回报的嘈杂预测，并且缔约双方均无法免除根据更新的信息重新商榷合同条例。本文发现，该先行指标可以减少经理的长期努力激励，因为其使得公司所有者可以通过重新协商的工资获得更多的回报（即经理被搁置）。通过降低未来总现金流的不确定性，先行指标也加剧了棘轮效应，并阻碍了经理的短期努力。在均衡状态下，随着先行指标在预测未来现金流量方面变得更加准确，第一期合约给予前瞻性先行指标和后向现金流更高的权重，同时经理可能会最优地减少短期和长期的努力。本文进一步表明，通过更准确的领先指标变量，对滞后现金流的明确激励可能比先行指标增加更多，并且公司均衡利润可能会减少且偏离经理的均衡努力水平。
关键词：先行指标变量；持有问题；棘轮效应
Leading indicator variables and managerial incentives in a dynamic agency setting
Fan Qintao (Univ Oregon, Lundquist Coll Business); Li Wei (Univ Illinois, Gies Coll Business)
ABSTRACT
This paper studies, in a dynamic agency setting, how incentives and contractual efficiency are affected by leading indicators of firms' future financial performance. In our two-period model, a leading indicator variable provides a noisy forecast of the uncertain return from the manager's long-term effort, and both contracting parties cannot refrain from renegotiating contract terms based on updated information. We find that the leading indicator can reduce the manager's long-term effort incentive, as it allows the firm owner to capture more of the resulting return through renegotiated wages (i.e., the manager is held up). By reducing the uncertainty about future aggregate cash flows, the leading indicator also exacerbates the ratchet effect and discourages the manager's short-term effort. In equilibrium, as the leading indicator becomes more accurate in forecasting future cash flows, the first-period contract attaches higher explicit weights to both the forward-looking leading indicator and backward-looking cash flow, and yet the manager may find it optimal to reduce both the short- and long-term efforts. We further show that with a more accurate leading indicator variable, the explicit incentive on the lagging cash flow may increase more than that on the leading indicator, and the equilibrium firm profit may decrease and diverge from the manager's equilibrium efforts.
Keywords: Leading indicator variables; Holdup problem; Ratchet effect
原文链接：
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11142-018-9461-3
翻译：谭丰林
