Review of Financial Studies - Advance Access

Heterogeneous Expectations and Bond Markets

Xiong, W., Yan, H. — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:21:05 PST

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. The heterogeneous expectations cause agents to take on speculative positions against each other and therefore generate endogenous relative wealth fluctuation. The relative wealth fluctuation amplifies asset price volatility and contributes to the time variation in bond premia. Our model shows that a modest amount of heterogeneous expectations can help explain several puzzling phenomena, including the "excessive volatility" of bond yields, the failure of the expectations hypothesis, and the ability of a tent-shaped linear combination of forward rates to predict bond returns.

Why Does the Law of One Price Fail? An Experiment on Index Mutual Funds

Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., Madrian, B. C. — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:30:22 PST

We evaluate why individuals invest in high-fee index funds. In our experiments, subjects each allocate $10,000 across four S&P 500 index funds and are rewarded for their portfolio's subsequent return. Subjects overwhelmingly fail to minimize fees. We reject the hypothesis that subjects buy high-fee index funds because of bundled nonportfolio services. Search costs for fees matter, but even when we eliminate these costs, fees are not minimized. Instead, subjects place high weight on annualized returns since inception. Fees paid decrease with financial literacy. Interestingly, subjects who choose high-fee funds sense they are making a mistake.

Do Envious CEOs Cause Merger Waves?

Goel, A. M., Thakor, A. V. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:49:50 PST

We develop a theory which shows that merger waves can arise even when the shocks that precipitated the initial mergers in the wave are idiosyncratic. The analysis predicts that the earlier acquisitions produce higher bidder returns, involve smaller targets, and result in higher compensation gains for the acquirer's top management team than the later acquisitions in the wave. We find strong empirical support for these predictions. The model also generates additional predictions, some of which remain to be tested.

Do Analysts Herd? An Analysis of Recommendations and Market Reactions

Jegadeesh, N., Kim, W. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:14:10 PST

This article develops and implements a new test to investigate whether sell-side analysts herd around the consensus when they make stock recommendations. Our empirical results support the herding hypothesis. Stock price reactions following recommendation revisions are stronger when the new recommendation is away from the consensus than when it is closer to it, indicating that the market recognizes analysts’ tendency to herd. We find that analysts from larger brokerages, analysts following stocks with smaller dispersion across recommendations, and analysts who make less frequent revisions are more likely to herd.

The Value of Control in Emerging Markets

Chari, A., Ouimet, P. P., Tesar, L. L. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:57:28 PST

When a developed-country multinational firm acquires majority control of a firm in an emerging market, there is an economically large and statistically significant increase in the acquiring firm's stock price. In 1986–2006, developed-market acquirers experienced positive and significant abnormal returns of 1.16%, on average, over a three-day event window. Positive acquirer returns and dollar value gains appear unique to emerging-market mergers and acquisitions and are not replicated when the same developed-market acquirers take over firms in developed markets. The size of the stock price increase is more pronounced (a) the weaker the contracting environment in the emerging market and (b) for industries with high asset intangibility.

How Do Pensions Affect Corporate Capital Structure Decisions?

Shivdasani, A., Stefanescu, I. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:02:51 PST

This article examines the capital structure implications of defined benefit corporate pension plans. The magnitude of the liabilities arising from these pension plans is substantial. We show that leverage ratios for firms with pension plans are about 35% higher when pension assets and liabilities are incorporated into the capital structure. We estimate that the tax shields from pension contributions are about a third of those from interest payments. Pension contributions have a modest effect in lowering firms’ marginal corporate tax rates. Once pensions are considered, firms are less conservative in their choice of leverage than has been previously thought. We show that firms incorporate the magnitude of their pension assets and liabilities into their capital structure decisions.

The Levered Equity Risk Premium and Credit Spreads: A Unified Framework

Bhamra, H. S., Kuehn, L.-A., Strebulaev, I. A. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:26:42 PDT

We embed a structural model of credit risk inside a dynamic continuous-time consumption-based asset pricing model, which allows us to price equity and corporate debt in a unified framework. Our key economic assumptions are that the first and second moments of earnings and consumption growth depend on the state of the economy, which switches randomly, creating intertemporal risk, which agents prefer to resolve sooner rather than later, because they have Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences. Agents optimally choose dynamic capital structure and default times. For a dynamic cross-section of firms, our model endogenously generates a realistic average term structure and time series of actual default probabilities and credit spreads, together with a reasonable levered equity risk premium, which varies with macroeconomic conditions.

Lending Relationships and Information Rents: Do Banks Exploit Their Information Advantages?

Schenone, C. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:51:42 PDT

In the process of lending to a firm, a bank acquires proprietary firm-specific information that is unavailable to nonlenders. This asymmetric evolution of information between lenders and prospective lenders grants the former an information monopoly. This article empirically investigates whether relationship banks exploit this advantage by charging higher interest rates than those that would prevail were all banks symmetrically informed. My identification strategy hinges on the notion that large information shocks that level the playing field among banks erode the relationship bank’s information monopoly. I use the borrower’s initial public offering (IPO) as such an information-releasing event, and build a panel dataset in which the unit of observation is a firm’s lending relationships before and after its IPO. Prior to a firm’s IPO, I find a U-shaped relation between borrowing rates and relationship intensity. After the IPO, interest rates are decreasing in relationship intensity. Furthermore, mean interest rates drop after an IPO. The results are robust to firm and loan-year fixed effects, and to controls for firm leverage pre- and post-IPO. Thus, the reported interest rate pattern is clean of any confounding effects that might arise from changes in financial risk.

Option Valuation with Conditional Heteroskedasticity and Nonnormality

Christoffersen, P., Elkamhi, R., Feunou, B., Jacobs, K. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:00:30 PDT

We provide results for the valuation of European-style contingent claims for a large class of specifications of the underlying asset returns. Our valuation results obtain in a discrete time, infinite state space setup using the no-arbitrage principle and an equivalent martingale measure (EMM). Our approach allows for general forms of heteroskedasticity in returns, and valuation results for homoskedastic processes can be obtained as a special case. It also allows for conditional nonnormal return innovations, which is critically important because heteroskedasticity alone does not suffice to capture the option smirk. We analyze a class of EMMs for which the resulting risk-neutral return dynamics are from the same family of distributions as the physical return dynamics. In this case, our framework nests the valuation results obtained by Duan (1995) and Heston and Nandi (2000) by allowing for a time-varying price of risk and nonnormal innovations. We provide extensions of these results to more general EMMs and to discrete-time stochastic volatility models, and we analyze the relation between our results and those obtained for continuous-time models.

The Market Price of Aggregate Risk and the Wealth Distribution

Chien, Y., Lustig, H. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:53:09 PDT

We introduce limited liability in a model with a continuum of ex ante identical agents who face aggregate and idiosyncratic income risk. These agents can trade a complete menu of contingent claims, but they cannot commit to honor their promises, and their shares in a Lucas tree serve as collateral to back up their state-contingent promises. The limited-liability option gives rise to a second risk factor, in addition to aggregate consumption growth risk. This liquidity risk is created by binding solvency constraints, and it is measured by the growth rate of one moment of the wealth distribution. The economy is said to experience a negative liquidity shock when this growth rate is high and a large fraction of agents faces severely binding solvency constraints. The adjustment to the Breeden-Lucas stochastic discount factor induces substantial time variation in equity risk-premims that is consistent with the data at business cycle frequencies.

Lending Relationships and Loan Contract Terms

Bharath, S. T., Dahiya, S., Saunders, A., Srinivasan, A. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:17:37 PDT

We find that repeated borrowing from the same lender translates into a 10–17 bps lowering of loan spreads and that relationships are especially valuable when borrower transparency is low. These results hold using multiple approaches (propensity score matching, instrumental variables, and treatment effects model) that control for the endogeneity of relationships. We also provide a demarcation line between relationship and transactional lending. Spreads charged for relationship loans and nonrelationship loans are statistically identical if the borrower is in the largest 30% by asset size; has public rated debt; or is part of the S&P 500 index. Past relationships reduce collateral requirements and are also associated with obtaining larger loans. Our results imply that, even for firms that have multiple sources of outside financing, borrowing from a prior lender obtains better loan terms.

Managerial Agency and Bond Covenants

Chava, S., Kumar, P., Warga, A. — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:47:28 PDT

Based on an analysis of the agency risk for bondholders from managerial entrenchment and fraud, we derive and test refutable hypotheses about the influence of managerial agency risk on bond covenants, using a comprehensive database of corporate bonds from the 1993–2007 period. Managerial entrenchment and the risk of managerial fraud significantly influence the use of covenants, in the direction predicted by the agency-theoretic framework. Our analysis highlights the varied effects of entrenchment on different types of agency risks faced by bondholders: Entrenched managers aggravate investment risk, but ameliorate risk from shareholder opportunism. Covenant use also responds efficiently to the quality of information available regarding the risk of managerial fraud.

How Law Affects Lending

Haselmann, R., Pistor, K., Vig, V. — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:32:25 PDT

The paper investigates the effect of legal change on the lending behavior of banks in twelve transition economies. First, we find that banks increase the supply of credit subsequent to legal change. Second, changes in collateral law matter more for increases in bank lending than do changes in bankruptcy law. We attribute this finding to the different functions of collateral and bankruptcy law. While the former enhances the likelihood that individual creditors can realize their claims against a debtor, the latter ensures an orderly process for resolving multiple, and often conflicting, claims after a debtor has become insolvent. Finally, we find that foreign-owned banks respond more strongly to legal change than incumbents.

The Impact of a Strong Bank-Firm Relationship on the Borrowing Firm

Dass, N., Massa, M. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:39:31 PDT

Commercial banks acquire inside information about the firms they lend to. We study the impact of this informationally privileged position on the borrowing firm using a broad panel of U.S. firms over the 1993–2004 period. We measure the strength of the bank-firm relationship by bank-firm proximity, size of the loan, and the lender's insider potential. We show that a stronger relationship, by inducing better monitoring, improves the borrower's corporate governance. Simultaneously, it makes the bank a potentially more informed agent in the equity market. This information asymmetry increases adverse selection for the other market participants and lowers the firm's stock liquidity. This trade-off between improved corporate governance and greater information asymmetry affects the firm's value. Our results have normative implications for the role of banks in the development of financial markets.

Internal Governance Mechanisms and Operational Performance: Evidence from Index Mutual Funds

Adams, J. C., Mansi, S. A., Nishikawa, T. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:34:14 PDT

We provide new evidence linking board characteristics and performance. Using manually collected governance data from the mutual fund industry, we find an inverse relation between board size and fund performance. We also find evidence that organizational form plays an important role in determining operational performance. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that there may not be a single optimal board structure that is applicable to all funds, that attempts to regulate board attributes should be considered with caution, and that sponsor-level factors are important board structure considerations.

Evidence on the Dark Side of Internal Capital Markets

Ozbas, O., Scharfstein, D. S. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:03:41 PDT

This article documents differences between the Q-sensitivity of investment of stand-alone firms and unrelated segments of conglomerate firms. Unrelated segments exhibit lower Q-sensitivity of investment than stand-alone firms. This fact is driven by unrelated segments of conglomerate firms that tend to invest less than stand-alone firms in high-Q industries. This finding is robust to matching on industry, year, size, age, and profitability. The differences are more pronounced in conglomerates in which top management has small ownership stakes, suggesting that agency problems explain the investment behavior of conglomerates.

The Evolution of Corporate Ownership after IPO: The Impact of Investor Protection

Foley, C. F., Greenwood, R. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:10:11 PDT

Panel data on corporate ownership in thirty-four countries between 1995 and 2006 reveal that newly public firms have concentrated ownership regardless of the level of investor protection. After listing, firms in countries with strong investor protection are more likely to experience decreases in ownership concentration; these decreases occur in response to growth opportunities, and they are associated with new share issuance. We conclude that ownership concentration falls after listing in countries with strong investor protection, because firms in these countries continue to raise capital and grow, diluting blockholders as a consequence.

Learning by Trading

Seru, A., Shumway, T., Stoffman, N. — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:48:57 PDT

Using a large sample of individual investor records over a nine-year period, we analyze survival rates, the disposition effect, and trading performance at the individual level to determine whether and how investors learn from their trading experience. We find evidence of two types of learning: some investors become better at trading with experience, while others stop trading after realizing that their ability is poor. A substantial part of overall learning by trading is explained by the second type. By ignoring investor attrition, the existing literature significantly overestimates how quickly investors become better at trading.

Market-Based Corrective Actions

Bond, P., Goldstein, I., Prescott, E. S. — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:30:21 PDT

Many economic agents take corrective actions based on information inferred from market prices of firms’ securities. Examples include directors and activists intervening in the management of firms and bank supervisors taking actions to improve the health of financial institutions. We provide an equilibrium analysis of such situations in light of a key problem: if agents use market prices when deciding on corrective actions, prices adjust to reflect this use and potentially become less revealing. We show that market information and agents’ information are complementary, and discuss measures that can increase agents’ ability to learn from market prices.

When Can Life Cycle Investors Benefit from Time-Varying Bond Risk Premia?

Koijen, R. S. J., Nijman, T. E., Werker, B. J. M. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:42:45 PDT

We study the importance of time-varying bond risk premia in a consumption and portfolio-choice problem for a life-cycle investor facing short-sales and borrowing constraints. Tilts in the optimal asset allocation in response to changes in bond risk premia exhibit pronounced life-cycle patterns. We find that the investor is willing to pay an annual fee up to 1% to implement a strategy that optimally conditions on prevailing bond risk premia in addition to her age and wealth. To solve our model, we extend recently developed simulation-based techniques to life-cycle problems featuring multiple state variables and multiple risky assets.

Endogenous Entry and Partial Adjustment in IPO Auctions: Are Institutional Investors Better Informed?

Chiang, Y.-M., Qian, Y., Sherman, A. E. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:14:53 PDT

Using a unique dataset of complete bid information for every IPO auction in Taiwan during 1995–2000, we examine the behaviors and returns of two groups—institutional and retail investors—in a setting in which underwriters do not have pricing or allocation discretion. We find that the bids of institutional investors are generally consistent with the predictions of IPO auction theory for informed bidders, while those of individual investors are not. Specifically, returns are higher when more institutional investors enter the auction or bid higher prices, suggesting institutional investors are informed and are also able to shave bids adequately. However, individual investors as a group exhibit return-chasing behavior, are uninformed, and systematically overbid.

The "Antidirector Rights Index" Revisited

Spamann, H. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:50:04 PDT

The "antidirector rights index" has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in over a hundred articles since it was introduced by La Porta et al. ("Law and Finance." 1998, Journal of Political Economy 106:1113–55). A thorough reexamination of the legal data, however, leads to corrections for thirty-three of the forty-six countries analyzed. The correlation between corrected and original values is only 0.53. Consequently, many empirical results established using the original index may not be replicable with corrected values. In particular, the corrected index fails to support three widely influential claims: that shareholder protection is higher in common than in civil law countries; that shareholder protection predicts stock market size or ownership dispersion; and that weak corporate governance explains the extent of exchange rate depreciation during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998.

Shareholders at the Gate? Institutional Investors and Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions

Ferreira, M. A., Massa, M., Matos, P. — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:24:16 PDT

We study the role of institutional investors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that foreign institutional ownership is positively associated with the intensity of cross-border M&A activity worldwide. Foreign institutional ownership increases the probability that a merger deal is cross-border, successful, and the bidder takes full control of the target firm. This relation is stronger in countries with weaker legal institutions and in less developed markets, suggesting some substitutability between local governance and foreign institutional investors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that foreign institutional investors act as facilitators in the international market for corporate control; they build bridges between firms and reduce transaction costs and information asymmetry between bidder and target. We conclude that cross-border portfolio investments of institutional money managers and cross-border M&As are complements in promoting financial integration worldwide.

Portfolio Performance and Agency

Dybvig, P. H., Farnsworth, H. K., Carpenter, J. N. — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:33:51 PDT

In this paper we analyze the optimal contract for a portfolio manager who can exert effort to improve the quality of a private signal about future market prices. We assume complete markets over states distinguished by asset payoffs and place no restrictions on the form of the contract. We show that trading restrictions are essential because they prevent the manager from undoing the incentive effects of performance-based fees. We provide conditions under which simple benchmarking emerges as optimal compensation. Additional incentives to take risk are necessary when information can be manipulated or else the manager will understate information to offset the benchmarking.

Out-of-Sample Equity Premium Prediction: Combination Forecasts and Links to the Real Economy

Rapach, D. E., Strauss, J. K., Zhou, G. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:15:52 PDT

Welch and Goyal (2008) find that numerous economic variables with in-sample predictive ability for the equity premium fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecasting gains relative to the historical average. Arguing that model uncertainty and instability seriously impair the forecasting ability of individual predictive regression models, we recommend combining individual forecasts. Combining delivers statistically and economically significant out-of-sample gains relative to the historical average consistently over time. We provide two empirical explanations for the benefits of forecast combination: (i) combining forecasts incorporates information from numerous economic variables while substantially reducing forecast volatility; (ii) combination forecasts are linked to the real economy.

Dynamic Investment and Financing under Personal Taxation

Morellec, E., Schurhoff, N. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:05:50 PDT

In this paper we examine the effects of capital gains taxation on firms' investment and financing decisions. We develop a real-options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm's capital structure are endogenously and jointly determined. Our analysis demonstrates that the asymmetric taxation of capital gains and losses fosters investment by eroding the option value of waiting. It also shows that firms controlled by taxable investors employ more equity financing, the higher the firm's stock price and the worse the firm's historical performance. Using a large sample of U.S. industrial firms that are owned by taxable investors between 1970 and 2008, we present new evidence on corporate investment and financing policies, which is supportive of the model's predictions.

Dynamic Asset Allocation: Portfolio Decomposition Formula and Applications

Detemple, J., Rindisbacher, M. — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:12:44 PDT

A new decomposition of the optimal portfolio, in dynamic models with von Neumann–Morgenstern preferences and Ito prices, is established. The formula rests on a change of numéraire that uses pure discount bonds as units of account. The dynamic hedging demand has two components. The first hedge insures against fluctuations in an optimally designed bond with a maturity date matching the investor's horizon. The second hedge immunizes against fluctuations in the market price of risk in the bond numéraire. Various applications are examined. New results concerning the behavior of extremely risk-averse individuals, the demand for bonds and its long-horizon limit, and the optimal portfolio in incomplete markets are derived.

Investor Protection and Interest Group Politics

Bebchuk, L. A., Neeman, Z. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:59:18 PDT

We model how three groups—insiders in existing public companies, institutional investors, and entrepreneurs planning to take firms public—compete for influence over politicians setting the level of investor protection. We identify factors that push toward suboptimal investor protection, including corporate insiders’ ability to use public firms’ assets to influence politicians, and institutional investors’ inability to capture fully the value of investor protection for outside investors. Entrepreneurs and public firms’ interest in raising equity capital does not fully eliminate the distortions arising from insiders seeking to extract rents from capital in place. Our analysis produces many testable predictions concerning how investor protection varies over time and around the world.

Expected Idiosyncratic Skewness

Boyer, B., Mitton, T., Vorkink, K. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:01:02 PDT

We test the prediction of recent theories that stocks with high idiosyncratic skewness should have low expected returns. Because lagged skewness alone does not adequately forecast skewness, we estimate a cross-sectional model of expected skewness that uses additional predictive variables. Consistent with recent theories, we find that expected idiosyncratic skewness and returns are negatively correlated. Specifically, the Fama-French alpha of a low-expected-skewness quintile exceeds the alpha of a high-expected-skewness quintile by 1.00% per month. Furthermore, the coefficients on expected skewness in Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions are negative and significant. In addition, we find that expected skewness helps explain the phenomenon that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility have low expected returns.

Financial Visibility and the Decision to Go Private

Mehran, H., Peristiani, S. — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:16:34 PDT

A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions at both the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. This article investigates the determinants of the decision to go private over a firm's entire public life cycle. Our evidence reveals that firms with declining growth in analyst coverage, falling institutional ownership, and low stock turnover were more likely to go private and opted to do so sooner. We argue that a primary reason behind the decision of IPO firms to abandon their public listing was a failure to attract a critical mass of financial visibility and investor interest.

Too Many to Fail? Evidence of Regulatory Forbearance When the Banking Sector Is Weak

Brown, C. O., Dinc, I. S. — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:31:35 PDT

This article studies bank failures in twenty-one emerging market countries in the 1990s. By using a competing risk hazard model for bank survival, we show that a government is less likely to take over or close a failing bank if the banking system is weak. This Too-Many-to-Fail effect is robust to controlling for macroeconomic factors, financial crises, the Too-Big-to-Fail effect, domestic financial development, and concerns due to systemic risk and information spillovers. The article also shows that the Too-Many-to-Fail effect is stronger for larger banks and when there is a large government budget deficit.

Ex-dividend Arbitrage in Option Markets

Hao, J., Kalay, A., Mayhew, S. — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:07:36 PDT

We examine the behavior of call options surrounding the underlying stock's ex-dividend date. The evidence is inconsistent with the predictions of a rational exercise policy; a significant fraction of the open interest remains unexercised, resulting in a windfall gain to option writers. This triggers a sophisticated trading scheme that enables short-term traders to receive a significant fraction of the gains. The trading scheme inflates reported volume and distorts its traditional relations to liquidity. The dramatic increases in the volume of trade on the last cum-dividend day are facilitated by limitations on transaction costs passed by the various option exchanges.

Variance Risk-Premium Dynamics: The Role of Jumps

Todorov, V. — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:03:52 PDT

Using high-frequency stock market data and (synthetic) variance swap rates, this paper identifies and investigates the temporal variation in the market variance risk-premium. The variance risk is manifest in two salient features of financial returns: stochastic volatility and jumps. The pricing of these two components is analyzed in a general semiparametric framework. The key empirical results imply that investors' fears of future jumps are especially sensitive to recent jump activity and that their willingness to pay for protection against jumps increases significantly immediately after the occurrence of jumps. This in turn suggests that time-varying risk aversion, as previously documented in the literature, is primarily driven by large, or extreme, market moves. The dynamics of risk-neutral jump intensity extracted from deep out-of-the-money put options confirms these findings.

The Effect of Bank Mergers on Loan Prices: Evidence from the United States

Erel, I. — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:07:52 PDT

Bank mergers can increase or decrease loan spreads, depending on whether the increased market power outweighs efficiency gains. Using proprietary loan-level data for U.S. commercial banks, I find that, on average, mergers reduce loan spreads, with the magnitude of the reduction being larger when postmerger cost savings increase. My results suggest that the relation between spreads and the extent of the market overlap between merging banks is nonmonotonic. The market overlap increases cost savings and consequently lowers spreads, but when the overlap is sufficiently large, spreads increase, potentially due to the market-power effect dominating the cost savings. Furthermore, the average reduction in spreads is significant for small businesses.

Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Demyanyk, Y., Van Hemert, O. — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:35:42 PDT

Using loan-level data, we analyze the quality of subprime mortgage loans by adjusting their performance for differences in borrower characteristics, loan characteristics, and macroeconomic conditions. We find that the quality of loans deteriorated for six consecutive years before the crisis and that securitizers were, to some extent, aware of it. We provide evidence that the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market follows a classic lending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. Problems could have been detected long before the crisis, but they were masked by high house price appreciation between 2003 and 2005.

Information Linkages and Correlated Trading

Colla, P., Mele, A. — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:24:43 PDT

In a market with informationally connected traders, the dynamics of volume, price informativeness, price volatility, and liquidity are severely affected by the information linkages every trader experiences with his peers. We show that in the presence of information linkages among traders, volume and price informativeness increase. Moreover, we find that information linkages improve or damage market depth, and lower or boost the Traders' profits, according to whether these linkages convey positively or negatively correlated signals. Finally, our model predicts patterns of trade correlation consistent with those identified in the empirical literature: trades generated by "neighbor" traders are positively correlated and trades generated by "distant" traders are negatively correlated.

Financial Constraints, Investment, and the Value of Cash Holdings

Denis, D. J., Sibilkov, V. — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:39:29 PDT

Previous studies report that cash holdings are more valuable for financially constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. We examine (i) why this is so and (ii) why some constrained firms appear to hold too little cash. Our results indicate that greater cash holdings are associated with higher levels of investment for constrained firms with high hedging needs and that the association between investment and value is stronger for constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. These findings imply that higher cash holdings allow constrained firms to undertake value-increasing projects that might otherwise be bypassed. We further find that some constrained firms exhibit low cash holdings because of persistently low cash flows. Overall, our findings support the view that greater cash holdings of constrained firms are a value-increasing response to costly external financing.

Extreme Governance: An Analysis of Dual-Class Firms in the United States

Gompers, P. A., Ishii, J., Metrick, A. — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:24:26 PDT

We construct a comprehensive list of dual-class firms in the United States and use this list to analyze the relationship between insider ownership and firm value. Our data have two useful features. First, since dual-class stock separates cash-flow rights from voting rights, we can separately identify the impact of each. Second, we address endogeneity concerns by using exogenous predictors of dual-class status as instruments. In single-stage regressions, we find strong evidence that firm value is increasing in insiders’ cash-flow rights and decreasing in insider voting rights. In instrumental variable regressions, the point estimates are similar but the significance levels are lower.

Growth or Glamour? Fundamentals and Systematic Risk in Stock Returns

Campbell, J. Y., Polk, C., Vuolteenaho, T. — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:54:03 PDT

The cash flows of growth stocks are particularly sensitive to temporary movements in aggregate stock prices, driven by shocks to market discount rates, while the cash flows of value stocks are particularly sensitive to permanent movements, driven by shocks to aggregate cash flows. Thus, the high betas of growth (value) stocks with the market's discount-rate (cash-flow) shocks are determined by the cash-flow fundamentals of growth and value companies. Growth stocks are not merely "glamour stocks" whose systematic risks are purely driven by investor sentiment. More generally, the systematic risks of individual stocks with similar accounting characteristics are primarily driven by the systematic risks of their fundamentals.

What Do Independent Directors Know? Evidence from Their Trading

Ravina, E., Sapienza, P. — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:09:29 PDT

We compare the trading performance of independent directors and other executives. The findings reveal that independent directors earn positive substantial abnormal returns when they purchase their company stock, and that the difference from the same firm's executives is relatively small at most horizons. We also find that executives and independent directors make higher returns in firms with the weakest governance, the gap between these two widens in such firms, and that independent directors sitting on the audit committee earn higher returns than other independent directors at the same firm. Independent directors also earn significantly abnormal returns when they sell the company stock in a window before bad news and around earnings restatements.

The Effects of Marital Status and Children on Savings and Portfolio Choice

Love, D. A. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:59:52 PDT

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. The analysis indicates that marital-status transitions can have important effects on optimal household decisions, particularly in the cases of widowhood and divorce. Children also play a fundamental role in portfolio choice; in addition to leading to substantially different average allocations, they also have strong interaction effects with changes in marital status. Panel data evidence on stockholding suggests that changes in marital status and children matter empirically as well, but not always in the manner that the model predicts.

Return Reversals, Idiosyncratic Risk, and Expected Returns

Huang, W., Liu, Q., Rhee, S. G., Zhang, L. — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:15:55 PDT

The empirical evidence on the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic risk and expected stock returns is mixed. We demonstrate that the omission of the previous month's stock returns can lead to a negatively biased estimate of the relation. The magnitude of the omitted variable bias depends on the approach to estimating the conditional idiosyncratic volatility. Although a negative relation exists when the estimate is based on daily returns, it disappears after return reversals are controlled for. Return reversals can explain both the negative relation between value-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic volatility and the insignificant relation between equal-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic volatility. In contrast, there is a significantly positive relation between the conditional idiosyncratic volatility estimated from monthly data and expected returns. This relation remains robust after controlling for return reversals.

Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in the Highest Incomes?

Kaplan, S. N., Rauh, J. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:40:15 PST

We study how much of the top end of the income distribution is represented by four sectors—non-financial-firm top executives (Main Street); investment bankers and hedge, private equity, and mutual fund investors (Wall Street); corporate lawyers; and athletes and celebrities. Wall Street individuals comprise a higher percentage of the top income brackets than nonfinancial executives of public companies. While top executives’ representation in the top brackets has increased from 1994 to 2004, Wall Street's representation has likely increased even more. We discuss the implications of our findings for different explanations for the increased skewness at the highest income levels.

What You Sell Is What You Lend? Explaining Trade Credit Contracts

Giannetti, M., Burkart, M., Ellingsen, T. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:54:09 PST

We relate trade credit to product characteristics and aspects of bank–firm relationships and document three main empirical regularities. First, the use of trade credit is associated with the nature of the transacted good. In particular, suppliers of differentiated products and services have larger accounts receivable than suppliers of standardized goods and firms buying more services receive cheaper trade credit for longer periods. Second, firms receiving trade credit secure financing from relatively uninformed banks. Third, a majority of the firms in our sample appear to receive trade credit at low cost. Additionally, firms that are more creditworthy and have some buyer market power receive larger early payment discounts.