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Using Eva to Align Management Incentives with Shareholders’ Interests

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Using EVA to Align Management Incentives with Shareholders’ Interests
Incentive Compensation: The Need and the Challenge
The objective of most incentive compensation programs is to address the ‘agency’ problems that besiege public companies. Specifically, public firms that hire professional management experience a natural separation between those that own the firm (the “principals”, i.e., shareholders) and those that manage the firm (the “agent”). Once can conclude that, for the vast majority of public firms, the owners’ ultimate goal is to maximize their own wealth invested in that firm. In most cases, the board that shareholders have elected to represent the owners’ interests hires professional managers to accomplish this goal for them.
However, as Jensen and Meckling observed in a paper they co-authored in the mid-1970’s, without the proper incentives, most managers will not gravitate towards decisions that maximize firm wealth. Instead, the authors claim that managers with limited investment in the firm they have been hired to manage are inherently selfish. They will divert firm resources away from investments that create the most firm value towards those that bring the most value to the individual, such as perks, notoriety and empire-building. Jensen and Meckling proposed that the solution to this problem is to make the managers into owners by giving them equity and ultimately suggested that “the best way out of America’s corporatestructural rut was through leveraged LBOs”1.
While this is certainly a powerful argument, it is flawed for several reasons. First, due to market imperfections and volatility, it is often difficult for managers to understand the linkages between their actions and changes in the firm’s share price. Recent history has reinforced this limitation, as managers have manipulated short term earnings to meet “Wall Street

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