Woo-Jin CHANG
Associate Professor
” Good ideas are like flies. They’re everywhere. This is my special tool for trapping (zapping) one of them! “
Woo-Jin CHANG
Associate Professor
Before joining emlyon businsess school, I worked for INSEAD and HEC Paris and taught various courses in different programs. I received Ph.D. in Accounting from Columbia Business School. I passed the CPA exam in Korea and the U.S.A. and worked as an auditor and consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (Samil Accounting Corporation) in Korea.
My research interest is on corporate valuation, financial statement analysis, executive compensation, sell-side analysts behaviors and auditing.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
The Higher Moments of Future Earnings
We evaluate whether reported accounting numbers are informative about earnings uncertainty and whether earnings uncertainty is priced. We use quantile regressions to forecast the standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis of future earnings. These three moments are important measures of earnings uncertainty because they reflect the size of the average deviation from expected earnings and the amount of extreme upside potential, extreme downside risk, or both. We develop a novel approach for evaluating the reliability of our forecasts and we show that they are reliable. We also document that: (1) equity prices are increasing (decreasing) in the standard deviation and skewness (kurtosis) of lead return on equity and (2) credit spreads are increasing (decreasing) in the standard deviation and kurtosis (skewness) of lead return on assets. Our results indicate that historical financial statements are informative about earnings uncertainty and that earnings uncertainty is priced.
Financial distress risk and new CEO compensation
We examine how ex ante financial distress risk affects CEO compensation. To disentangle the joint effects of performance on compensation and distress risk, we focus our analyses on new CEOs. Our results indicate that financial distress risk affects compensation through two channels. First, new CEOs receive significantly more compensation when financial distress risk is higher. This finding is consistent with CEOs receiving a compensation premium for bearing this risk since CEOs experience large personal costs if their firms later become financially distressed. Second, financial distress risk is associated with the incentives provided to new CEOs; distress risk is positively associated with pay-performance sensitivity and equity-based compensation and is negatively associated with cash bonuses. Further, financial distress risk is positively associated with pay-risk sensitivity for new CEOs. These findings suggest that financial distress risk alters the nature of the agency relationship in ways that lead firms to provide CEOs with more equity-based incentives. We also build on research that finds a positive relation between forced turnover risk and CEO compensation. Our analyses suggest the compensation effects of forced turnover risk appear to be mainly attributable to financial distress risk. Overall, our results indicate financial distress risk is an economically important determinant of new CEO compensation packages.