Deviations from put-call parity contain information about future stock returns. Using the difference in implied volatility between pairs of call and put options to measure these deviations, we find that stocks with relatively expensive calls outperform stocks with relatively expensive puts by 50 basis points per week. We find both positive abnormal performance in stocks with relatively expensive calls and negative abnormal performance in stocks with relatively expensive puts, which cannot be explained by short sale constraints. Rebate rates from the stock lending market directly confirm that our findings are not driven by stocks that are hard to borrow. The degree of predictability is larger when option liquidity is high and stock liquidity low, while there is little predictability when the opposite is true. Controlling for size, option prices are more likely to deviate from strict put-call parity when underlying stocks face more information risk. The degree of predictability decreases over the sample period. Our results are consistent with mispricing during the earlier years of the study, with a gradual reduction of the mispricing over time.

While the signaling hypothesis has played a prominent role as the economic rationale associated with the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing puzzle (Welch (1989)), the empirical evidence on it has been mixed at best (Jegadeesh, Weinstein, and Welch (1993), Michaely and Shaw (1994)). This paper revisits the issue from the vantage point of close to two decades of additional experience by examining a sample of foreign IPOs—firms from both financially integrated and segmented markets—in U.S. markets. The evidence indicates that signaling does matter in determining IPO underpricing, especially for firms domiciled in countries with segmented markets, which as a result face higher information asymmetry and lack access to external capital markets. We find a significant positive and robust relationship between the degree of IPO underpricing and segmented-market firms’ seasoned equity offering (SEO) activities. For firms from integrated markets, in contrast, the analyst-coverage purchase hypothesis appears to matter more in explaining IPO underpricing, and the aftermarket price appreciation explains these firms’ SEO activities. The evidence, therefore, clearly supports the notion that some firms are willing to leave money on the table voluntarily to get a more favorable price at seasoned offerings when they are substantially wealth constrained, a prediction embedded in the signaling hypothesis.

In this paper we examine the relation between equity mispricing and arbitrage risk and find that stocks with high arbitrage risk have higher estimated mispricing than stocks with low arbitrage risk. These results are not limited to high book-to-market or small capitalization stocks, and they are not sensitive to transaction and short-selling costs. In addition, they remain robust to alternative multifactor return generating specification models and mispricing measures. Overall, our empirical results are consistent with the conjecture that mispricing is a manifestation of the inability of arbitrageurs to hedge idiosyncratic risk, a major deterrent to arbitrage activity.

This paper argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, stock return synchronicity (or R2) can increase when transparency improves. In a simple model, we show that, in more transparent environments, stock prices should be more informative about future events. Consequently, when the events actually happen in the future, there should be less “surprise” (i.e., less new information is impounded into the stock price). Thus a more informative stock price today means higher return synchronicity in the future. We find empirical support for our theoretical predictions in 3 settings: namely, firm age, seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), and listing of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs).

We study the consumption-investment problem of an agent with a constant relative risk aversion preference function, who possesses noisy information about the future prospects of a stock. We also solve for the value of information to the agent in closed form. We find that information can significantly alter consumption and asset allocation decisions. For reasonable parameter ranges, information increases consumption in the vicinity of 25%. Information can shift the portfolio weight on a stock from 0% to around 70%. Thus, depending on the stock beta, the weight on the market portfolio can be considerably reduced with information, causing the appearance of underdiversification. The model indicates that stock holdings of informed agents are positively related to wealth, unrelated to systematic risk, and negatively related to idiosyncratic uncertainty. We also show that the dollar value of information to the agent depends linearly on his wealth and decreases with both the propensity to intermediate consumption and risk aversion.

The paper explores the determinants of yield differentials between sovereign bonds, using euro-area data. There is a common trend in yield differentials, which is correlated with a measure of aggregate risk. In contrast, liquidity differentials display sizeable heterogeneity and no common factor. We propose a simple model with endogenous liquidity demand, where a bond’s liquidity premium depends both on its transaction cost and on investment opportunities. The model predicts that yield differentials should increase in both liquidity and risk, with an interaction term of the opposite sign. Testing these predictions on daily data, we find that the aggregate risk factor is consistently priced, liquidity differentials are priced for a subset of countries, and their interaction with the risk factor is in line with the model’s prediction and crucial to detect their effect.

The decline of average stock return volatility in the 2001–2006 period provides an opportunity to test various theories on why the average return volatility increased in the pre-2000 period. This paper compares fundamentals-based theories with trading volume-based theories. While both fundamentals-based and trading volume-based theories explain the upward trend in the average volatility in U.S. stocks from 1976 to 2000 and international stocks from 1990 to 2000, only the fundamentals-based theories explain the volatility pattern for 2001–2006. Much of the variation in the stock return volatilities can be explained by the variation in the earnings volatilities and proxies for growth options, but not by trading-related variables. Evidence also shows that the explanatory power of the fundamentals variables is time varying.

In a dynamic general equilibrium model, we derive conditions for a mutual fund separation property by which the savings decision is separated from the asset allocation decision. With logarithmic utility functions, this separation holds for any heterogeneity in discount factors, while the generalization to constant relative risk aversion holds only for homogeneous discount factors but allows for any heterogeneity in endowments. The logarithmic case provides a general equilibrium foundation for the growth-optimal portfolio literature. Both cases yield equilibrium asset pricing formulas that allow for investor heterogeneity, in which the return process is endogenous and asset prices are determined by expected discounted relative dividends. Our results have simple asset pricing implications for the time series as well as the cross section of relative asset prices. It is found that on data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a risk aversion smaller than in the logarithmic case fits best.

We examine the extent to which investment opportunities and/or mispricing motivate equity issuance and contribute to post-issue stock underperformance. We decompose market-to-book ratios into misvaluation and growth option components and find that issuing firms are both overvalued and have greater growth opportunities relative to nonissuers. Firms with greater growth opportunities invest more in capital expenditures and research and development (R&D) after issuance but do not experience lower post-issue stock returns. In contrast, issuing firms with greater mispricing tend to decrease long-term debt and/or increase cash holdings and do earn lower returns. Our findings are consistent with behavioral explanations for post-issue stock price underperformance.

We develop an equilibrium model in a 2-country, 2-good, pure exchange economy in which investors with logarithmic utility functions have heterogeneous beliefs about exogenously given output or endowment processes. We obtain closed-form representations of real exchange rates and of stock prices. We show that heterogeneous beliefs together with heterogeneous preferences make the volatility of real exchange rates and of stocks exhibit some properties that have been well documented in the empirical literature. These properties include the high volatility of both real exchange rates and stocks compared with that of economic fundamentals, the high correlation of stocks during periods of volatile markets. The model can also generate the clustering of the volatility of foreign exchange rates and stocks if the differences of beliefs are clustering.

This paper proposes a way to allow Bayesian priors to reflect the objectives of an economic problem. That is, we impose priors on the solution to the problem rather than on the primitive parameters whose implied priors can be backed out from the Euler equation. Using monthly returns on the Fama-French 25 size and book-to-market portfolios and their 3 factors from January 1965 to December 2004, we find that investment performances under the objective-based priors can be significantly different from those under alternative priors, with differences in terms of annual certainty-equivalent returns greater than 10% in many cases. In terms of an out-of-sample loss function measure, portfolio strategies based on the objective-based priors can substantially outperform both strategies under alternative priors and some of the best strategies developed in the classical framework.

We study the effects of investor protection on stock returns and portfolio allocation decisions. In our theoretical model, if investor protection is weak, wealthy investors have an incentive to become controlling shareholders. In equilibrium, the stock price reflects the demand from both controlling shareholders and portfolio investors. Due to the high demand from controlling shareholders, the price of weak corporate governance stocks is not low enough to fully discount the extraction of private benefits. Thus, stocks have lower expected returns when investor protection is weak. This has implications for domestic and foreign investors’ stockholdings. In particular, we show that portfolio investors’ participation in the domestic stock market and home equity bias are positively related to investor protection and provide original evidence in their support.

Aggregate idiosyncratic volatility spiked nearly fivefold during the Internet boom of the late 1990s, dwarfing in magnitude a moderately increasing trend. While some researchers argue that this rise in idiosyncratic risk was the result of changes in the characteristics of public firms, others argue that it was driven by the changing sentiment of irrational traders. We present evidence that the marketwide decline in maturity of the typical public firm can explain most of the increase in firm-specific risk during the Internet boom. Controlling for firm maturity, we find no evidence that investor sentiment drives idiosyncratic risk throughout the Internet boom.

This paper investigates how a firm’s capital structure choice affects the informational efficiency of its security prices in the secondary markets. We identify two new determinants of a firm’s capital structure policy: the liquidity (adverse selection) premium due to investors’ anticipated losses to informed trading, and operating efficiency improvement due to information revelation from the firm’s security prices. We show that the capital structure decision affects traders’ incentives to acquire information and subsequently, the distribution of informed traders across debt and equity claims. When information is less imperative for improving its operating decisions, a firm issues zero or negative debt (i.e., holding excess cash reserves) in order to reduce socially wasteful information acquisition and the liquidity premium associated with it. When information is crucial for a firm’s operating decisions, the optimal debt level is one that achieves maximum information revelation at the lowest possible liquidity cost. Our model can explain why many firms consistently hold no debt. It also provides new implications for financial system design and for the relationship among leverage, liquidity premium, profitability, and the cost of information acquisition.

The recent split share structure reform in China involves the nontradable shareholders proposing a compensation package to the tradable shareholders in exchange for the listing rights of their shares. We find that state ownership (the major owners of nontradable shares) has a positive effect on the final compensation ratio. In contrast, mutual fund ownership (the major institutional owner of tradable shares) has a negative effect on the compensation ratio and especially in state-owned firms. The evidence is consistent with our predictions that state shareholders have incentives to complete the reform quickly and exert political pressure on mutual funds to accept the terms without a fight.

Using an extensive cross section of U.S. corporate credit default swaps (CDSs), this paper offers an economic understanding of implied loss given default (LGD) and jumps in default risk. We formulate and underpin empirical stylized facts about CDS spreads, which are then reproduced in our affine intensity-based jump-diffusion model. Implied LGD is well identified, with obligors possessing substantial tangible assets expected to recover more. Sudden increases in the default risk of investment-grade obligors are higher relative to speculative grade. The probability of structural migration to default is low for investment-grade and heavily regulated obligors because investors fear distress rather through rare but devastating events.

I test whether social influence affects individual investors’ trading and stock returns. In each of the 20 most active stocks in Finland over 9 years, the number of owners in a municipality multiplied by the number of investors who do not own a stock, a measure of the rate of transmission of diseases and rumors through social contact, predicts individual investor trading. I control for known determinants of trade, including daily news, and show that competing explanations for the relation are unlikely. Socially motivated trades predict stock returns, and the effects are not reversed, suggesting that individuals share useful information. Individuals’ susceptibility to social influence has declined during the period, but the opportunities for social influence have increased.

This study develops an econometric model that incorporates features of price dynamics across assets as well as through time. With the dynamic factors extracted via the Kalman filter, we formulate an asset pricing model, termed the dynamic factor pricing model (DFPM). We then conduct asset pricing tests in the in-sample and out-of-sample contexts. Our analyses show that the ex ante factors are a key component in asset pricing and forecasting. By using the ex ante factors, the DFPM improves upon the explanatory and predictive power of other competing models, including unconditional and conditional versions of the Fama and French (1993) 3-factor model. In particular, the DFPM can explain and better forecast the momentum portfolio returns, which are mostly missed by alternative models.

Recent evidence indicates that momentum profits are sensitive to market conditions. We find that the profits are higher when the markets continue in the same state than when they transition to a different state. These findings support Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998), who suggest that investor overconfidence is higher when the markets continue in the same state (UP or DOWN) than when they reverse, predicting higher momentum profits in the former. In contrast, our evidence following DOWN markets is not consistent with the other competing models for the market-state conditional momentum profits.

We find that the market’s recent cross-sectional dispersion in stock returns is positively related to the subsequent value book-to-market premium and negatively related to the subsequent momentum premium. The partial relation between return dispersion (RD) and the subsequent value and momentum premiums remains strong when controlling for macroeconomic state variables suggested by the literature. Our findings are consistent with recent theoretical insights and empirical evidence that suggest that the market’s RD may serve as a leading countercyclical state variable, that the value premium is countercyclical, and that the momentum premium is procyclical.