értekezés - Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem

5. függelék - A vezetői kompenzációval kapcsolatos empirikus eredmények
Schrand/Unal [1998], Haushalter [1997, 2000], Tufano [1996], Gay/Nam [1998] find a
negative relationship between the extent of hedging and stock options held by managers.
However, Haushalter [2000] points at a difficulty in drawing strong conclusions about the
effects of options holdings on hedging. Since he is unable to calculate the delta and vega of
managers’ exercisable stock options, and as Guay [1999] argues that these sensitivities
determine the effect stock options have on the convexity of the relation between the
manager’s wealth and firm value 170 , the presence of stock options do not directly lead to
convex utility functions. As such, empirical results can not reliably back or oppose the
assumptions of theory.
In addition, Haushalter [2000] provides some evidence that the likelihood that a company
hedges is negatively correlated with the fraction of shares owned by managers, opposite to
that predicted by theory. This negative correlation may be attributed to, what he calls,
“self-selection” by the managers. That is, the more positive a manager’s outlook is toward
future market prices, the more likely he is to increase his shareholdings and the less likely
he is to hedge. Agrawal and Manelker [1987], and Hill and Snell [1988] find the same
negative correlation, but they explain it with the fact that increasing managerial ownership
makes their interests more aligned with those of shareholders, which latter may require
intensive risk-taking.
Wright, Ferris, Sarin and Awasthi [1996] observe a non-linear relationship between equity
ownership by managers and corporate risk taking. Their empirical results indicate that a
low degree of equity ownership by the managers of growth companies positively
influences corporate risk taking, but an increasing equity stake tends to reduce risk taking.
For firms without growth prospects, the impact of managers’ equity ownership on
corporate hedging is statistically insignificant.
Some of the papers investigate how the kind of compensation contract chosen by owners
depends on the investment opportunity set available. The inherent thought is that risk-
170 For example, the wealth of a manager whose options holdings are deep in-the-money is not as sensitive to
a change in the underlying risk of a company’s equity as one whose options holdings are slightly out-of-the
money.
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