This paper presents a model of stock market equilibrium with a finite number of corporations and studies its normative properties. Each firm is run by a manager whose effort is unobservable and influences the probabilities of the firm's outcomes. The Board of Directors of each firm chooses an incentive contract for the manager which maximizes the firm's market value. With a finite number of firms, the equilibrium is constrained Pareto optimal only when investors are risk-neutral and firms' outcomes are independent. The inefficiencies which arise when investors are risk-averse, or when firms are influenced by a common shock, are studied and it is shown that under reasonable assumptions there is under investment in effort in equilibrium. The inefficiencies exist when the firms are not completely negligible, as is typical of the large corporations with dispersed ownership traded on public exchanges in the US. In the idealized case where firms of each type are replicated and replaced by a continuum of firms of each type with independent outcomes, the inefficiencies disappear.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 44 (2008) Issue (Month): 7-8 (July) Pages: 785-806 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: