An analysis of 4,814 SEOs during 1986–1999 indicates that the average offering ofnew shares is priced at a discount of 3% from the closing price on the day before the issue. Discounts have risen steadily over time, sharply increasing the indirect costs of issuing seasoned equity. There is evidence of increased clustering of offer prices at integers, and of greater importance in the analyst coverage provided by underwriters. Adjusting for other factors, we find that issues with integer offer prices, and underwriters with highly regarded analysts, are increasingly associated with larger discounts. The rise in discounts is consistent with an increased ability of investment bankers to extract rents from issuing firms.

This paper investigates the pricing effects of financial innovation in an economy with endogenous participation and heterogeneous income risks. The introduction of non-redundant assets endogenously modifies the participation set, reduces the covariance between dividends and participants' consumption and thus leads to lower risk premia. In multisector economies, financial innovation spreads across markets through the diversified portfolio of new entrants, and has rich effects on the cross-section of expected returns. The price changes can also lead some investors to leave the markets and give rise to non-degenerate forms of participation turnover. The model is consistent with several features of financial markets over the past few decades: substantial innovation, higher participation, significant turnover in investor composition, improved risk management practices, a slight increase in real interest rates, and a reduction in risk premia.

The actions of the federal government can have a profound impact on financial markets. As prominent participants in the government decision making process, U.S. Senators are likely to have knowledge of forthcoming government actions before the information becomes public. This could provide them with an informational advantage over other investors. We test for abnormal returns from the common stock investments of members of the U.S. Senate during the period 1993–1998. We document that a portfolio that mimics the purchases of U.S. Senators beats the market by 85 basis points per month, while a portfolio that mimics the sales of Senators lags the market by 12 basis points per month. The large difference in the returns of stocks bought and sold (nearly one percentage point per month) is economically large and reliably positive.

In October 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) in an effort to reduce selective disclosure of material information by firms to analysts and other investment professionals. We find that the information asymmetry reflected in trading costs at earnings announcements has declined after Regulation FD, with the decrease more pronounced for smaller and less liquid stocks. Return volatility around mandatory announcements is also lower but overall information flow is unchanged when mandatory and voluntary announcements are combined. Thus, the SEC appears to have diminished the advantage of informed investors, without increasing volatility.

We test the hypothesis that insider trading impairs market liquidity by analyzing intraday trades and quotes around 1,497 IPO lockup expirations in the period 1995–1999. We find that, while lockup expirations are associated with considerable insider trading for some IPO firms, they have little effect on effective spreads. By contrast, two other liquidity measures, quote depth and trading activity, improve substantially. In the 23% of lockup expirations where insiders disclose share sales, spreads actually decline. These findings indicate that a large body of well-informed, blockholding insider traders can enter a market from which they had previously been absent, and substantially change trading volume and share price without impairing market liquidity.

The informational opacity of small businesses makes them an interesting area for the study of banks' lending practices and procedures. We use data from a survey of small businesses to analyze the micro level differences in the loan approval processes of large and small banks. We provide evidence that large banks ($1 billion or more in assets) employ standard criteria obtained from financial statements in the loan decision process, whereas small banks rely to a greater extent on information about the character of the borrower. These cookie-cutter and character approaches are compatible with the incentives and environments facing large and small banks.

Previous studies offer a mixed understanding of the economic role of stock repurchases. This paper investigates three key economic motivations—mispricing, disgorging free cash flow, and increasing leverage—by evaluating cross-sectional differences in both the initial market reaction and long-run performance. The initial reaction provides some support for the mispricing story. However, subsequent earnings-related information shocks suggest that the initial market reaction is incomplete and that long-run performance may be informative. The long-horizon return evidence is most consistent with the mispricing hypothesis and, to some degree, the free cash flow hypothesis. We find little support for the leverage hypothesis.

Firms that substantially increase capital investments subsequently achieve negative benchmark-adjusted returns. The negative abnormal capital investment/return relation is shown to be stronger for firms that have greater investment discretion, i.e., firms with higher cash flows and lower debt ratios, and is shown to be significant only in time periods when hostile takeovers were less prevalent. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that investors tend to underreact to the empire building implications of increased investment expenditures. Although firms that increase capital investments tend to have high past returns and often issue equity, the negative abnormal capital investment/return relation is independent of the previously documented long-term return reversal and secondary equity issue anomalies.

This paper introduces a Monte Carlo simulation method for pricing multidimensional American options based on the computation of the optimal exercise frontier. We consider Bermudan options that can be exercised at a finite number of times and compute the optimal exercise frontier recursively. We show that for every date of possible exercise, any single point of the optimal exercise frontier is a fixed point of a simple algorithm. Once the frontier is computed, we use plain vanilla Monte Carlo simulation to price the option and obtain a low-biased estimator. We illustrate the method with applications to several types of options.

Capital markets perform two distinct functions: provision of capital and facilitation of good governance through information production and monitoring. I argue that the governance function has more impact on the efficiency with which resources are utilized within the firm. Based on industry-level data across 38 countries, I present evidence suggesting a positive relation between market-based governance and improvements in industry efficiency. The measures of governance are also positively correlated with productivity improvements and growth in real output. Furthermore, while governance affects efficiency, the capital provision services induce technological change. The evidence underscores the role of capital markets as a conduit of socially valuable governance services as distinct from capital provision.

One striking feature of international portfolio investment is the extent to which equity portfolios are concentrated in the domestic equity market of the investor—the home bias puzzle. I examine the role of investors' perception of foreign investment risk on their portfolio choices. The expected returns and risk of foreign investment are specified through an asset pricing model with the home portfolio being the benchmark asset—Pastor's (2000) domestic CAPM. The model serves as a reference point around which investors can center their prior beliefs. I focus on investors' prior beliefs that are consistent with the literature on confidence in the familiar—foreign equities, in terms of both expected returns and risk, being viewed less favorably than domestic equities. These prior beliefs are then combined with the data on G7 equities, and the revised beliefs are used to obtain the global optimal asset allocation. To hold predominantly domestic equities, each G7 investor has to believe that the risk of foreign investment is several times higher than the actual risk. The home bias is more of a puzzle for a U.S. investor during the 1970s. Specifying investors' prior beliefs around the world CAPM does not help resolve the puzzle.

Many financial institutions employ outside portfolio managers to manage part or all of their investable assets. It is well recognized that outside portfolio managers are unwilling to share security information with each other or with the centralized decision maker and this in general will lead to sub-optimal portfolios. In this paper, we derive an implementable set of rules under which a central decision maker can make optimal decisions without requiring decentralized decision makers to reveal estimates of security returns. Furthermore, we derive conditions under which these rules hold and when they do not hold.

This paper presents a consumption-based model that explains the equity premium puzzle through two channels. First, because of borrowing constraints, the shareholder cannot completely diversify his income risk and requires a sizable risk premium on stocks. Second, because of limited stock market participation, the precautionary saving demand lowers the risk-free rate but not stock return and generates a substantial liquidity premium. This model also replicates many other salient features of the data, including the first two moments of the risk-free rate, excess stock volatility, stock return predictability, and the unstable relation between stock volatility and the dividend yield.

This paper studies a multi-factor, two-country term structure and exchange rate model when a diversification effect for an international bond portfolio is expected. It shows that the diversification gain calls upon certain restrictions on the process of the stochastic discount factor in a factor-structured economy. Existence of local factors is shown to be a necessary condition for the gains from investing in foreign bonds. Further, the exchange rate risk premia are shown to be a function of the differentials of the risk premia of the factors in bond returns. Empirical results reveal the tendency for investors to respond sensitively to rare shocks, which is shown to be a potential solution to the forward premium puzzle.

In 1997, the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted significant reforms in U.S. markets. Several studies document that the new order handling rules increased competition for Nasdaq stocks, but the reforms were designed with an additional goal in mind—to increase quote competition for the trading of NYSE-listed securities on Nasdaq (i.e., third market trading). An evaluation of the reforms in the third market indicates that they did not achieve this objective. Instead, both quote quality and quoting frequency were diminished, due primarily to elimination of the excess spread rule. This suggests that more significant changes are needed to increase inter-exchange competition.

Acquisitions, mergers, and other business agreements face increasing regulatory scrutiny, even when they involve firms domiciled outside the territory of regulatory authorities. Recent examples include mergers between American firms that were approved by American regulators but blocked by European regulators. Regulatory reciprocity seems a likely future trend. There are obvious consequences for the successful completion of future business combinations. This paper explains the regulatory procedures of the European Commission with respect to business combinations, documents the price reactions of subject firms on dates from the initial announcement to the final regulatory decision, and studies whether European regulators tend to shield European firms from foreign competition. Our main results are: i) the market clearly reacts to European regulatory intervention even when the subject firms are non-European, ii) the probability of intervention is not related to the nationality of the bidder, however, iii) when intervention does occur, the market anticipates it will be more costly when the bidder is non-European, so protectionism cannot be rejected outright, and iv) regulatory interventions are anticipated by investors, so they affect the initial announcement returns.

Building on the managerial entrenchment literature, we develop and test a novel perspectiveon payout policy that integrates the influence of internal governance mechanisms, investment opportunities, management compensation, and monitoring by large shareholders. Our study incorporates both dividend payments and share repurchases, and examines the determinants of the likelihood and the level of payouts. Our model performs well in both in-sample and out-of-sample predictions on a sample of 2,081 firms during 1992–2000. We find that both the likelihood and the level of payouts are significantly and positively (negatively) related to factors that increase (decrease) executive entrenchment levels, even when controlling for size, leverage, and the proportion of tangible to total assets. We identify factors that significantly affect the likelihood but not the level of payouts (or vice versa), and show that entrenchment has an asymmetric influence on dividend vs. shares repurchase policy.

We investigate the pricing of 4,989 equity IPOs with offer dates between 1981 and 2000. Approximately three-fourths of these IPOs have integer offer prices. Average initial returns for IPOs with integer offer prices are significantly higher (24.5%) than those priced on the fraction of the dollar (8.1%). This result is robust through time and after conditioning for other effects known to influence initial returns. We hypothesize that integer vs. fractional dollar IPOs are the result of negotiations between the issuing firm and underwriter. Under this negotiation hypothesis, the frequency of integer pricing should be an increasing function of the offer price and the degree of uncertainty surrounding the value of the firm. Empirical evidence, supportive of the negotiation hypothesis, is presented.

Motivated by economic models of sequential trade, empirical analyses of market dynamics frequently estimate liquidity as the coefficient of signed order flow in a price change regression. This paper implements such an analysis for futures transaction data from pit trading. To deal with the absence of timely bid and ask quotes (which are used to sign trades in most equity market studies), this paper proposes new techniques based on Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation. The model is estimated for four representative Chicago Mercantile Exchange contracts. The highest liquidity (lowest order flow coefficient) is found for the S&P 500 index. Liquidity for the Euro and U.K. £ contracts is somewhat lower. The pork belly contract exhibits the least liquidity.

This paper proposes modified versions of the Sharpe ratio and Jensen's alpha, which are appropriate in a simple continuous-time model. Both are derived from optimal portfolio selection. The modified Sharpe ratio equals the ordinary Sharpe ratio plus half of the volatility of the fund. The modified alpha also differs from the ordinary alpha by a second-moment adjustment. The modified and the ordinary Sharpe ratios may rank funds differently. In particular, if two funds have the same ordinary Sharpe ratio, then the one with the higher volatility will rank higher according to the modified Sharpe ratio. This is justified by the underlying dynamic portfolio theory. Unlike their discrete-time versions, the continuous-time performance measures take into account that it is optimal for investors to change the fractions of their wealth held in the fund vs. the riskless asset over time.