This article examines managerial ownership structure and at-issue yield spreads on corporate bonds. There is a positive relation between managerial ownership and borrowing costs, and this relation is weaker at higher levels of ownership. In addition, managerial stock options have a larger effect on yield spreads than stock ownership. These effects exist after controlling for firm and bond characteristics, and are robust to endogeneity and sample selection concerns. The evidence suggests that rational bondholders price new debt issues using the information about a firm's future risk choices contained in managerial incentive structures, and that lenders anticipate higher risk-taking incentives from managerial stock options than from equity ownership.

We study the effect of investor horizons on corporate behavior. We argue that longer investor horizons attenuate the effect of stock mispricing on corporate policies. Consistent with our argument, we find that when a firm is undervalued, greater long-term investor ownership is associated with more investment, more equity financing, and less payouts to shareholders. Our results do not appear to be explained by long-term investor self-selection, monitoring (corporate governance), or concentration (blockholdings). Our results are consistent with a version of market timing in which mispriced firms cater to the tastes of their short-term investors rather than their long-term investors.

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 Internet initial public offerings (IPOs) and a matching sample of 458 non-Internet IPOs (a total of 171,488 news items) and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media were more positive for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic rise in share prices and more negative for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic fall in share prices. We then document that media hype is unable to explain the Internet bubble: A 1,646% difference exists in returns between Internet stocks and non-Internet stocks from January 1, 1997, through March 24, 2000 (the market peak), and the media can explain only 2.9% of that.

Almost twenty years ago, Markowitz [4] first suggested that portfolio selection be regarded as a parametric quadratic programming problem. Risk is stated in terms of the predicted variance of portfolio return — a function that is quadratic in the decision variables (the proportions of the portfolio invested in various securities). All other functions (e.g., expected return) and constraints are assumed to be linear. The objective is to find the set of efficient feasible portfolios. A portfolio is feasible if it satisfies a set of relevant linear constraints; it is efficient if it provides (1) less variance than any other feasible portfolio with the same expected return and (2) more expected return than any other feasible portfolio with the same variance.

We study the impact of barriers to international capital flows with stock price data from 11 countries whose stock markets feature shares restricted to locals and otherwise identical shares available to foreigners. Large price premiums for unrestricted shares relative to matching restricted shares are typically observed. Although basic notions of international asset pricing offer a straightforward explanation for the price premiums, we find little evidence that the price premiums are explained by lower foreign required returns. Alternative concepts and theories centering on foreign investor demand and the supply of shares explain some of the time-series and cross-sectional variation of price premiums. More specifically, premiums for unrestricted shares are positively correlated with foreign investor demand in the form of international mutual fund flows, sentiment implicit in matching closed-end country fund premiums, market liquidity, and information reflected in press coverage, country credit rating, and firm size.

In this paper, we identify jumps in U.S. Treasury-bond (T-bond) prices and investigate what causes such unexpected large price changes. In particular, we examine the relative importance of macroeconomic news announcements versus variation in market liquidity in explaining the observed jumps in the U.S. Treasury market. We show that while jumps occur mostly at prescheduled macroeconomic announcement times, announcement surprises have limited power in explaining bond price jumps. Our analysis further shows that preannouncement liquidity shocks, such as changes in the bid-ask spread and market depth, have significant predictive power for jumps. The predictive power is significant even after controlling for information shocks. Finally, we present evidence that post-jump order flow is less informative relative to the case where there is no jump at announcement.

After fitting a topic model to 40,927 COVID-19–related paragraphs in 3,581 earnings calls over the period Jan. 22–Apr. 30, 2020, we obtain firm-level measures of exposure and response related to COVID-19 for 2,894 U.S. firms. We show that despite the large negative impact of COVID-19 on their operations, firms with a strong corporate culture outperform their peers without a strong culture. Moreover, these firms are more likely to support their community, embrace digital transformation, and develop new products than those peers. We conclude that corporate culture is an intangible asset designed to meet unforeseen contingencies as they arise.

Little attention has been paid by the academic community in the United States to the Japanese stock market and its structure. Japan has the second largest economy in the Western world, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) is second only to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in terms of aggregate market values and sales volume. Analysis of the Japanese stock market is useful given its relative importance, but, in addition, examination of the Japanese market may offer insights into controversies surrounding U.S. markets. This study focuses on two such current controversies: the January and size anomalies.

This paper tests international asset pricing models using firm-level expected returns estimated from an implied cost of capital approach. We show that the implied approach provides clear evidence of economic relations that would otherwise be obscured by the noise in realized returns. Among G-7 countries, expected returns based on implied costs of capital have less than one-tenth the volatility of those based on realized returns. Our tests show that firm-level expected returns increase with world market beta, idiosyncratic volatility, financial leverage, and book-to-market ratios, and decrease with currency beta and firm size.

We examine aggregate idiosyncratic volatility in 23 developed equity markets, measured using various methodologies. We find no evidence of upward trends after extending the sample to 2008. Instead, idiosyncratic volatility is well described by a stationary autoregressive process that occasionally switches into a higher-variance regime that has relatively short duration. We also document that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated across countries. Most of the time variation in idiosyncratic volatility can be attributed to variation in a growth opportunity proxy, total (U.S.) market volatility, and in most specifications, the variance premium, a business cycle sensitive risk indicator.

Ample evidence points to a negative relation between internal funds (profitability) and the demand for external funds (debt issuance). This relation has been interpreted as evidence supporting the pecking order theory. We show, however, that the negative effect of internal funds on the demand for external financing is concentrated among firms that are least likely to face high external financing costs (firms that distribute large amounts of dividends, that are large, and whose debt is rated). For firms on the other end of the spectrum (low payout, small, and unrated), external financing is insensitive to internal funds. These cross-firm differences hold separately for debt and equity, and they are magnified in the aftermath of macroeconomic movements that tighten financing constraints. We argue that the greater complementarity between internal funds and external financing for constrained firms is a consequence of the interdependence of their financing and investment decisions.

We examine the formation and evolution of corporate risk culture, that is, the preferences toward risk and uncertainty shared by a firm’s leaders, as well as its effect on corporate policies. We document persistent commonality in risk attitudes inside firms, which arises through the selection of leaders with similar preferences and is rooted in the founders’ risk attitudes. Changes in corporate risk culture over time affect corporate investment policies, whereas cross-sectional differences in founders’ risk attitudes, that is, firms’ initial risk culture, contribute to differences across firms in persistent firm policies, such as research and development intensity.

We analyze a private firm’s choice of exit mechanism between initial public offerings (IPOs) and acquisitions, and we provide a resolution to the “IPO valuation premium puzzle.” The private firm is run by an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist (VC) (insiders) who desire to exit partially from the firm. A crucial factor driving their exit choice is competition in the product market: While a stand-alone firm has to fend for itself after going public, an acquirer is able to provide considerable support to the firm in product market competition. A second factor is the difference in information asymmetry characterizing the two exit mechanisms. Finally, the private benefits of control accruing to the entrepreneur post-exit and the bargaining power of outside investors versus firm insiders are also different across the two mechanisms. We analyze two situations: the first, where the entrepreneur can make the exit choice alone (independent of the VC), and the second, where the entrepreneur can make the exit choice only with the concurrence of the VC. We derive a number of testable implications regarding insiders’ exit choice between IPOs and acquisitions and about the IPO valuation premium puzzle.

The stock market is in the midst of an era of change unparalleled since the Great Depression, long-standing institutions — including the major stock exchanges — are being radically challenged by contemporary developments, and novel approaches to making markets for common stocks are appearing with increasing frequency. In addition, the Martin Report and the recent hearings of the Securities and Exchange Commission on the future structure of the equities market indicate that the regulatory climate surrounding the stock market can be expected to undergo serious change in the near future.

Stock markets in the United States and foreign countries exhibit a strong weekly seasonal, an empirical regularity for which no theoretical explanation has been found. One's belief in this phenomenon would be strengthened if it is known to also occur in capital markets separated from those in the United States by distance, institutional arrangements, and culture.

Equilibrium in the market for real assets requires that the price of those assets be bid up to reflect the tax shields they can offer to levered firms. Thus, there must be an equality between the market values of real assets and the values of optimally levered firms. The standard measure of the advantage to leverage compares the values of levered and unlevered assets, and can be misleading and difficult to interpret. We show that a meaningful measure of the advantage to debt is the extra rate of return, net of a market premium for bankruptcy risk, earned by a levered firm relative to an otherwise-identical unlevered firm. We construct an option valuation model to calculate such a measure and present extensive simulation results. We use this model to compute optimal debt maturities, show how this approach can be used for capital budgeting, and discuss its implications for the comparison of bankruptcy costs versus tax shields.

Estimating implied volatility by inverting the Black-Scholes formula is subject to considerable error when option characteristics are observed with plausible errors. Especially for options away from the money, large changes in volatility produce small changes in option prices. Conversely, small errors in option prices and other option characteristics produce large errors in implied volatilities. In the presence of small measurement errors, unobserved truncation of option prices that violate lower bounds for absence of arbitrage can also lead to systematic volatility smiles. The paper proposes feasible GLS estimators that reduce the noise and bias in implied volatility estimates.

This paper studies the relation between fund performance and fund attributes in the Swedish market. Performance is measured as the alpha in a linear regression of fund returns on several benchmark assets, allowing for time-varying betas. The estimated performance is then used in a cross-sectinal analysis of the relation between performance and fund attributes such as past performance, flow, size, turnover, and proxies for expenses and trading activity. The results show that good performance occurs among small equity funds, low fee funds, funds whose trading activity is high and, in some cases, funds with good past performance.

We test the implications of anchoring bias associated with forecast earnings per share (FEPS) for forecast errors, earnings surprises, stock returns, and stock splits. We find that analysts make optimistic (pessimistic) forecasts when a firm’s FEPS is lower (higher) than the industry median. Further, firms with FEPS greater (lower) than the industry median experience abnormally high (low) future stock returns, particularly around subsequent earnings announcement dates. These firms are also more likely to engage in stock splits. Finally, split firms experience more positive forecast revisions, more negative forecast errors, and more negative earnings surprises after stock splits.

We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91,000 investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings. We identify classes of momentum investors and contrarian investors. We use these classes to build up “behavioral factors” based on contrarian and momentum flows and we show that they are relevant for pricing. They perform well against a benchmark of loadings on latent factors extracted from returns.