Why and how firms use operating cash flow in compensation
研究了企业为何在薪酬合同中采用经营现金流指标，发现营运资本管理越重要的企业越可能使用该指标，且该指标权重随其重要性增加而提高。
This study considers the choice of operating cash flow (OCF) in contracts and further examines the sensitivity of the CFO's and CEO's compensation to OCF performance, conditional on our stylized indicator of the importance of working capital management (WCM). The analysis depicts OCF as conveying distinct information about WCM, and predicts that firms for which WCM is an important source of value are more likely to contract on OCF. The importance of WCM is instrumented by firm conditions that create strong demand for WCM, including large working capital, rapid growth in working capital, highly volatile working capital, and large debt relative to total assets. Using a sample of firms whose incentive plans explicitly include OCF measures and a control sample of firms without such plans, we show that all four indicators of the importance of WCM have positive association with the likelihood of contracting upon OCF, individually and collectively. In compensation regressions, we find that WCM importance has a pronounced positive effect on the weight of OCF, but muted effect on the weight of accrual earnings. The results suggest that firms include measures of OCF performance in contracts largely to provide incentives for WCM and internal cash generation.