We examine the relation between mutual fund votes on shareholder executive compensation proposals and pension-related business ties between fund families and the firms. In unconditional tests, we find that fund families support management when they have pension ties to the firm. We find no relation when we stratify by fund family in conditional tests, which suggests that fund families with pension ties vote with management at both client and nonclient firms. We confirm this result in an analysis of nonclient firms. Overall, our results suggest that pension-related business ties influence fund families to vote with management at all firms.

This paper tests the influential hypothesis that irrational traders will be driven out of financial markets by trading losses. The paper’s main finding is that overconfident currency dealers are not driven out of the market. Dealers with extensive experience are neither more nor less overconfident than their junior colleagues. We set the stage for this investigation by providing evidence that currency dealers display two forms of overconfidence: They underestimate uncertainty, and they overestimate their professional success. This is notable because one might have expected the opposite: currency dealers face strong incentives for accuracy, they have access to comprehensive information, and they have extensive experience.

We investigate how differences in regulation regarding banking-commerce integration and banking sector concentration influence loan spreads across 29 countries. Theoretical research posits conflicting effects based on agency costs, information asymmetry costs, and market power. Increased integration is associated with lower loan spreads in countries with low concentration, but moving to high levels of integration increases spreads in countries with high concentration. Starting from lower levels, an increase in integration is associated with an increase in informational efficiency that disappears at higher levels of integration. We also show that market concentration affects loan spreads differently under high-, medium-, and low-integration regimes.

We study decisions to sell nonexcludable private information in the presence of a trading opportunity. Sell-side agents heighten competition among agents who buy their signals to combine with their own for proprietary trading purposes and thereby promote financial market efficiency. This result holds even when the sell-side production technology is not unique. But sell-side information is subject to underinvestment if producers do not internalize the benefits. The model suggests that fee-based compensation for corporate advisory services diminishes this problem and that market efficiency is undermined by forces steering investment-banking resources toward proprietary trading.

U.S. equity mutual funds, on average, prefer realization of capital losses to capital gains. Nevertheless, a substantial fraction exhibits the disposition effect of realizing gains more readily than losses. My analysis suggests that learning effects have reduced the manifestation of the disposition effect over time, implying that academic research has influenced industry practices. When funds experience outflows and are managed by teams of portfolio managers, they are more susceptible to selling disproportionately more winners than losers. Disposition-driven behavior affects investment style, causing lower market betas and characteristics of value-oriented and contrarian styles, but has no observable effect on fund performance.

We use Tobin’s q models of investments to estimate the relationship between corporate governance and the level of innovative activity. Simple ordinary least squares (OLS) models suggest that poor governance reduces innovative activity. However, OLS results are sensitive to controlling for serial correlation, unobserved effects, or using instrumental variables to control simultaneity. Controlling for these effects substantially reduces or eliminates the relationship between governance and innovative activity.

Current attempts to reform financial markets presume that shareholder empowerment benefits shareholders. We investigate the wealth effects associated with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. Our results are not in line with shareholder empowerment creating value: The average daily abnormal returns surrounding events that increase (decrease) the probability of the proposal’s passage are significantly negative (positive). Furthermore, given an increase in the probability of the proposal’s passage, firms whose shareholders are more likely to use the rule to nominate directors experience more negative abnormal returns.

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains affect the prices of cash flow versus discount rate risk. We construct a return decomposition distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas in up and down markets. Using U.S. data, we find that downside cash flow and discount rate betas carry the largest premia. Downside cash flow risk is priced consistently across different samples, periods, and return decomposition methods. It is the only component of beta with significant out-of-sample predictive ability. Downside cash flow premia mainly occur for small stocks, while large stocks are compensated for symmetric cash-flow-related risk.

This paper explores the cross-sectional variation of expected returns for a large cross section of industry and size/book-to-market portfolios. We employ mixed data sampling (MIDAS) to estimate a portfolio’s conditional beta with the market and with alternative risk factors and innovations to well-known macroeconomic variables. The market risk premium is positive and significant, and the result is robust to alternative asset pricing specifications and model misspecification. However, the traditional 2-pass ordinary least squares (OLS) cross-sectional regressions produce an estimate of the market risk premium that is negative, and significantly different from 0. Using alternative procedures, we compare both beta estimators. We conclude that beta estimates under MIDAS present lower mean absolute forecasting errors and generate better out-of-sample performance of the optimized portfolios relative to OLS betas.

We find that equity mispricing impacts the speed at which firms adjust to their target leverage (TL) and does so in predictable ways depending on whether the firm is over- or underlevered. For example, firms that are above their TL and should therefore issue equity (or retire debt) adjust more rapidly toward their target when their equity is overvalued. However, when a firm is undervalued but needs to reduce leverage, the speed of adjustment is much slower. Our findings support the role of equity mispricing as an important factor that alters the cost of making capital structure adjustments.

In the empirical finance literature, findings on the risk-return tradeoff in excess stock market returns are ambiguous. In this study, I develop a new qualitative response (QR)-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity-in-mean (GARCH-M) model combining a probit model for a binary business cycle indicator and a regime-switching GARCH-M model for excess stock market return with the business cycle indicator defining the regime. Estimation results show that there is statistically significant variation in the U.S. excess stock returns over the business cycle. However, consistent with the conditional intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM), there is a positive risk-return relationship between volatility and expected return independent of the state of the economy.

We study after-hours trading (AHT), price contributions, and price discovery following quarterly earnings announcements released outside of the normal trading hours. For Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index stocks from 2004–2008, AHT is heightened on announcement days. A significant portion of the price change and price discovery occurs immediately after the earnings releases. Prices in AHT show a large degree of informational efficiency, further demonstrating the importance of price discovery in AHT. We also provide evidence suggesting that firms prefer after-hours earnings announcements, as trades are mainly from informed traders, and those trades are relied upon to convey information to the general public.

We investigate the long-term effect of the Asian financial crisis on corporate cash holdings in 8 East Asian countries. The Asian firms build up cash holdings by decreasing investment activities after the crisis. We find that the increase in cash holdings is not explained by changes in firm characteristics but by changes in the firms’ demand function for cash, which indicates that the crisis has systematically changed the firms’ cash-holding policies. Specifically, the firms’ increased sensitivity to cash flow volatility is one of the main factors explaining the higher level of their cash holdings in the postcrisis period.

Open market share repurchase announcements are commonly associated with equity undervaluation, but their signal about firm value can often be misleading. We conjecture that executives who buy shares of their firm before an announcement add credibility to the undervaluation signal. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that announcement returns are positively related to past insider purchases, especially for firms that are priced less efficiently. Firms whose insiders bought more shares are also more likely to complete their repurchase plans. Finally, we find that insider purchases predict post-announcement stock returns.

An intermarket sweep order (ISO) is a limit order that automatically executes in a designated market center even if another market center is publishing a better quotation. An investor submitting an ISO must satisfy order protection rules by concurrently submitting orders to the markets with better prices. We find that ISOs represent 46% of trades and 41% of volume in our sample. ISO trades have a significantly larger information share despite their small trade size relative to non-ISO trades. Post trade return analysis suggests that informed institutions are the main users of ISO trades.

Macro announcements change the equilibrium risk-free rate. We find that Treasury prices reflect part of the impact instantaneously, but intermediaries rely on their customer order flow after the announcement to discover the full impact. This customer flow informativeness is strongest when analyst macro forecasts are most dispersed. The result holds for 30-year Treasury futures trading in both electronic and open-outcry markets. We further show that intermediaries benefit from privately recognizing informed customer flow, as their own-account trading profitability correlates with customer order access.

Well-performing default predictions show good discrimination and calibration. Discrimination is the ability to separate defaulters from nondefaulters. Calibration is the ability to make unbiased forecasts. I derive novel discrimination and calibration statistics to verify forecasts expressed in terms of probability under dependent observations. The test statistics’ asymptotic distributions can be derived in analytic form. Not accounting for cross correlation can result in the rejection of actually well-performing predictions, as shown in an empirical application. I demonstrate that forecasting errors must be serially uncorrelated. As a consequence, my multiperiod tests are statistically consistent.

This study tests whether belief differences affect the cross-sectional variation of risk-neutral skewness using data on firm-level stock options traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange from 2003 to 2006. We find that stocks with greater belief differences have more negative skews, even after controlling for systematic risk and other firm-level variables known to affect skewness. Factor analysis identifies latent variables linked to risk and belief differences. The belief factor explains more variation in the risk-neutral skewness than the risk-based factor. Our results suggest that belief differences may be one of the unexplained firm-specific components affecting skewness.

Model selection (i.e., the choice of an asset pricing model to the exclusion of competing models) is an inherently misguided strategy when the true model is unavailable to the researcher. This paper illustrates the advantages of a model pooling approach in characterizing the cross section of stock returns. The optimal pool combines models using the log predictive score criterion, a measure of the out-of-sample performance of each model, and consistently outperforms the best individual model. The benefits to model pooling are most pronounced during periods of economic stress, and it is a valuable tool for asset allocation decisions.

This is the first study of corporate bond mutual fund performance that examines detailed security-level holdings and returns. The new database allows us to decompose the costs and benefits of active management. In contrast to prior research on equity funds that shows evidence of stock-selection ability, we do not find evidence consistent with bond fund managers, on average, being able to select corporate bonds that outperform other bonds with similar characteristics. We find neutral to weakly positive evidence of ability to time corporate bond characteristics. Overall results show that the costs of active management on average appear larger than the benefits.