Recently, exchanges have been directly selling market data. We analyze how this practice affects price discovery, the cost of capital, return volatility, market liquidity, information production, and trader welfare. We show that selling price data increases the cost of capital and volatility, worsens market efficiency and liquidity, and discourages the production of fundamental information relative to a world in which all traders observe prices. Generally, allowing exchanges to sell price information benefits exchanges and harms liquidity traders. Overall, our results suggest that regulations on selling market data can play an important role in improving market quality and trader welfare.

The finance literature documents a relation between labor income and the cross section of stock returns. One possible explanation for this is the hedging decisions of investors with relative wealth concerns. This implies a negative risk premium associated with stock returns correlated with local undiversifiable wealth because investors are willing to pay more for stocks that help their hedging goals. We find evidence that is consistent with these regularities. In addition, we show that the effect varies across geographic areas depending on the size and variability of undiversifiable wealth, proxied by labor income.

We study the investment–cash flow sensitivities of U.S. firms from 1971–2009. Our tests extend the literature in several key ways and provide strong evidence that cash flow explains investment beyond its correlation with q. A dollar of current- and prior-year cash flow is associated with $0.32 of additional investment for firms that are the least likely to be constrained and $0.63 of additional investment for firms that are the most likely to be constrained, even after correcting for measurement error in q. Our results suggest that financing constraints and free-cash-flow problems are important for investment decisions.

We explore the link between open-market share repurchases (OMRs) and asymmetric information based on financial reporting quality and find that opaque firms experience positive abnormal returns of twice the magnitude of those of transparent firms. These significant differences remain after controlling for governance, earnings management, and firm characteristics. We document significantly positive long-run postannouncement returns for opaque firms, but not for transparent firms. We find that takeover activity and premiums rise with repurchase activity by opaque firms, which may explain some of the wealth effects. Our results suggest that asymmetric information plays an important role in the wealth effects around OMRs.

This article shows that correlated errors in news about fundamentals are an important, rational determinant of excess comovement. Individual analysts’ forecast errors tend to be correlated across stocks. Using a proxy for correlated forecast errors based on analyst coverage, I find that stocks with similar sets of analysts exhibit more excess comovement, controlling for industry and other variables. Exogenous changes in commonality in analyst coverage around i) brokerage firm mergers and ii) additions to an index lead to changes in excess comovement. This information channel explains 10% to 25% of the increase in comovement around additions to the S&P 500 index.

We investigate the role of country characteristics on the competition-governance relation. We find that competition is associated with higher ratings in corporate governance, but only in developing countries. Further, corporate governance is associated with greater firm value, but only in less competitive industries from developed countries. For developing countries, the evidence suggests that corporate governance is valuable mostly in competitive industries. Additional tests show that corporate governance increases labor productivity and cost efficiency, mostly in less competitive industries in both developed and developing countries. Furthermore, in developing countries, corporate governance increases investment in capital, but primarily in competitive industries.

We model the employee incentive problem jointly with a firm’s exit decision. Our model predicts that firms in industries where human capital is important are more likely to go public and use high-powered, stock-based compensation. We also show that the higher the management quality, the more likely a firm is to go public than to be acquired. Regarding life cycle, a firm with high capital intensity and/or high management quality will choose to go public at a younger age.

We examine asset allocation decisions under smooth ambiguity aversion when an investor has a prior degree of belief in the domestic capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Different from a Bayesian approach, the investor separately relies on the conditional distribution of returns and on the posterior over parameters to make decisions, rather than on the predictive distribution of returns that integrates priors and likelihood information. We find that in the perspective of U.S. investors, ambiguity aversion generates strong home bias in equity holdings, regardless of beliefs in the CAPM or risk aversion. Results become stronger under regime-switching investment opportunities.

Outside board chairs are more likely in firms that are smaller, have greater stock volatility and research and development intensity, and have a lower proportion of inside directors and less institutional ownership; they are also more likely when chief executive officers have shorter tenure and lower ownership. We also find that the existence of an outside chair is associated with geographical and industry norms. An outside chair is positively associated with firm performance, a finding robust to various estimation methods, including event study and multivariate analyses incorporating controls for endogeneity, as well as market and accounting measures of performance. We note, however, that the relationship between outside chair and firm performance varies with firm characteristics.

I propose a model in which the price of an option is partly determined by macro-finance variables. In an application using an index of current business conditions, the new model outperforms existing benchmarks in fitting underlying asset returns and in pricing options. The model performs particularly well when business conditions are deteriorating. Using the recent financial crisis as an out-of-sample experiment, the new model has option-pricing errors that are 18% below those of a nested 2-component volatility benchmark. Results are robust to using alternative business conditions proxies and comparing to different benchmark models.

We investigate how government interventions such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. These issues are critical for stability, access to finance, and economic growth. Exploiting cross-country and cross-time variation in the timing of interventions and accounting for their nonrandomness, we document that liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations trigger large increases in competition. We also find some more nuanced evidence that zombie banks’ market shares in crisis countries evolve together with interventions. A higher frequency of interventions coincides with greater zombie bank presence, and increases in competition are larger when zombie banks occupy bigger market shares.

We conduct a comprehensive comparison of market beta estimation techniques. We study the performance of several historical, time-series model, and option-implied estimators for estimating realized market beta. Thereby, we find the hybrid methodology of Buss and Vilkov to consistently outperform all other approaches. In addition, all other approaches, including fully implied and dynamic conditional beta, based on generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models, are dominated by a simple beta estimate based on historical (co-)variances and an approach based on the Kalman filter. Our conclusions remain unchanged after performing several robustness checks.