We use the introduction and subsequent removal of the flash-order functionality from NASDAQ as a natural experiment to investigate the impact of voluntary disclosure of trading intent on market quality. We find that flash orders significantly improve liquidity in NASDAQ. Furthermore, overall market quality improves (deteriorates) when flash functionality is introduced (removed). This result can be attributed to increased competition among liquidity suppliers across competing trading venues. Alternatively, flash orders attract responses from reactive traders immediately after the announcement, attracting more “hidden liquidity” and lowering risk-bearing costs for the overall market.

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.

To understand the nature of hedge fund managers’ skills, we study the implementation of risk arbitrage by hedge funds using their portfolio holdings and comparing them with those of other institutional arbitrageurs. We find that hedge funds significantly outperform a naive risk-arbitrage portfolio by 3.7% annually on a risk-adjusted basis, whereas non–hedge fund arbitrageurs fail to outperform the benchmark. Our analysis reveals that hedge funds’ superior performance does not reflect fund managers’ ability to predict or affect the outcome of merger and acquisition deals; rather, hedge fund managers’ superior performance is attributed to their ability to manage downside risk.

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.

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates how debt structure and strategic interaction among shareholders and debt holders in the event of default affect expected stock returns. The model predicts that expected stock returns are higher for firms that face high debt renegotiation difficulties and that have a large fraction of secured or convertible debt. Using a large sample of publicly traded U.S. firms for the period 1985–2012, the paper presents new evidence on the link between debt structure and stock returns that is supportive of the model’s predictions.

We provide new empirical evidence that U.S. expected growth and consumption volatility are closely related to the strong comovement in sovereign spreads. We rationalize these findings in an equilibrium model with recursive utility for credit default swap (CDS) spreads. The framework links a reduced-form default process with country-specific sensitivity to expected growth and macroeconomic uncertainty. Exploiting the high-frequency information in the CDS term structure across 38 countries, we estimate the model and find parameters consistent with preference for early resolution of uncertainty. Our results confirm the existence of time-varying risk premia in sovereign spreads as compensation for exposure to common U.S. macroeconomic risk.

Tying initial public offering (IPO) allocations to after-listing purchases of other IPO shares as a form of price support has generated much theoretical interest and media attention. Price support is price manipulation and can reduce secondary investor return. In the past, obtaining data to investigate price support has proven to be difficult. I document that price support is harming secondary investor return using new data from the Oslo Stock Exchange. I also show that investors who engage in price support are allocated more future oversubscribed allocations, whereas harmed secondary investors significantly reduce their future participation in the secondary market.

We document that suppliers to purely financially distressed companies that are highly likely to reorganize in bankruptcy incur little or no spillover costs. In contrast, suppliers to economically distressed firms experience large losses in market value that are linked to proxies for the cost of replacing the bankrupt customers. Suppliers experience increased selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses and lower margins in the year following the bankruptcy of their trading partners, which we link to proxies for partner replacement costs. Suppliers continue to extend trade credit to firms that are healthier and in situations where the cost of replacing the partner is higher.

Building on the growing literature on interfirm links and limited attention, we find evidence of return predictability across alliance partners. A long–short portfolio sorted on lagged returns of strategic alliance partners provides a return of 89 basis points per month that is robust to a number of specifications. Investor inattention and limits to arbitrage may be the source of the underreaction of a firm’s returns to that of its partners.

This article examines the benefits of corporate bond diversification for U.S. investors. Analysis of a newly compiled bond-level data set for 2000–2010 finds that diversification with corporate bonds can significantly reduce volatility and increase risk-adjusted returns for U.S. investors. Unlike diversification with equities, corporate bonds offer significant out-of-sample risk reduction, particularly during the recent financial crisis. Risk-reduction gains are large even when the benchmark includes international equities or when longer samples of equities and sovereign bonds are used to inform corporate bond returns. Finally, significant risk-reduction gains remain after accounting for bond characteristics, liquidity, and informational costs.

This article presents a unique test of the effectiveness of technical analysis in different sentiment environments by focusing on its usage by perhaps the most sophisticated and astute investors, namely, hedge fund managers. We document that during high-sentiment periods, hedge funds using technical analysis exhibit higher performance, lower risk, and superior market-timing ability than nonusers. The advantages of using technical analysis disappear or even reverse in low-sentiment periods. Our findings are consistent with the view that technical analysis is relatively more useful in high-sentiment periods with larger mispricing, which cannot be fully exploited by arbitrage activities because of short-sale impediments.

We study hedge fund performance evaluation under the stochastic discount factor framework of Farnsworth, Ferson, Jackson, and Todd (FFJT). To accommodate dynamic trading strategies and derivatives used by hedge funds, we extend FFJT’s approach by considering models with option and time-averaged risk factors and incorporating option returns in model estimation. A wide range of models yield similar conclusions on the performance of simulated long/short equity hedge funds. We apply these models to 2,315 actual long/short equity funds from the Lipper TASS database and find that a small portion of these funds can outperform the market.

We study how securities analysts influence managers’ use of different types of earnings management. To isolate causality, we employ a quasi-experiment that exploits exogenous reductions in analyst following resulting from brokerage house mergers. We find that managers respond to the coverage loss by decreasing real earnings management while increasing accrual manipulation. These effects are significantly stronger among firms with less coverage and for firms close to the zero-earnings threshold. Our causal evidence suggests that managers use real earnings management to enhance short-term performance in response to analyst pressure, effects that are not uncovered when focusing solely on accrual-based methods.

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.

Using a 57-year global foreign listing sample, we identify cross-listing waves at the host market, home market, and industry levels. Waves in host markets are often due to cross-listing waves in proximate home markets. Consistent with gravity-model implications and economic-synergy arguments of cross-listing decisions, cross-listing waves in a given host country coincide with the outperformance of the host and proximate home countries’ economies and financial markets. The valuation gains from listings associated with cross-listing waves are transitory, supporting the market-timing component in these decisions. Our results provide novel evidence of nonmonotonic market development across countries and over time.

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.

I develop two new types of portfolio efficiency when returns are predictable. The first type maximizes the unconditional Sharpe ratio of excess returns and differs from unconditional efficiency unless the safe asset return is constant over time. The second type maximizes conditional mean-variance preferences and differs from unconditional efficiency unless, additionally, the maximum conditional Sharpe ratio is constant. Using stock data, I quantify and test their performance differences with respect to unconditionally and fixed-weight efficient returns. I also show the relevance of the two new portfolio strategies to test conditional asset pricing models.

We study the return predictability of a measure of continuing overreaction based on the weighted average of signed volumes. We find that the strategies of buying stocks with upward continuing overreaction and selling stocks with downward continuing overreaction generate significant positive returns and that our measure of continuing overreaction is a better predictor of future returns than past returns. The results are stronger among stocks primarily held by investors more prone to biased self-attribution. Our results provide direct support for the model of return predictability based on overconfidence and biased self-attribution.

Stock options are used only sparingly in Japan. Japanese firms are more likely to adopt new stock option plans when they are more (less) owned by arms-length investors (stable and controlling shareholders). Those firms have significantly more independent boards and pay higher dividends surrounding the adoption year than their industry peers. These results suggest that firms adopting stock options endeavor to meet demands for good governance practice from arms-length shareholders and to follow good governance practices in other dimensions. The coexistence of arms-length, stable, and controlling shareholders generates a situation in which stock options are not widely used in Japan.

We show that the currency risk embedded in the benchmarks of international mutual funds negatively affects fund performance. More specifically, a high benchmark-implied currency risk induces funds to invest in markets with less volatile currencies, leading to a higher degree of currency concentration in portfolio holdings. This currency concentration, however, departs from the optimal equity allocation strategy across countries and reduces fund performance. We document that funds resorting to high currency concentrations underperform funds with low currency concentrations by as much as 1%–2% per year.