This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreads in the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competition primarily by the number of dealers active in the market and find that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition, even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expected level of competition is time varying, highly predictable, and displays a strong seasonal component that in part is induced by geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hour trading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition of one more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by 1.7%
This article investigates the long-term equity performance of Japanese firms issuing convertible debt and equity. We find that issuing firms perform poorly (except for equity rights issues) compared to nonissuing firms even though the stock-price reaction to convertible debt and equity issues is not negative for Japanese firms. This underperformance is strongest for firms issuing public convertible debt. In contrast to the United States, poor performance is not concentrated in smaller firms and in firms with a high market-to-book ratio. Simple behavioral explanations advanced for the new issue puzzle in the United States do not seem consistent with the Japanese experience.
We examine communication in laboratory games with asymmetric information. Sellers know true asset qualities. Potential buyers only know the quality distribution. Prohibiting communication, we document the degree of adverse selection. Then we examine two alternative communication mechanisms. Under “cheap talk”, each seller can announce any subset of qualities. Under “antifraud”, the subset must include the true quality. Both mechanisms improve market efficiency, but very differently. Relying on sellers' frequently exaggerated claims, buyers often overpay under cheap talk. Efficiency gains come at the buyer's expense. The antifraud rule improves efficiency further and eliminates the wealth transfer from buyers to sellers.
We account for the relation between stock returns and inflation with two independent disturbances: supply shocks and demand shocks. Supply shocks reflect real output shocks and cause a negative relation between stock returns and inflation, while demand shocks are mainly due to monetary shocks and generate a positive relation between stock returns and inflation. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that the stock return–inflation relation varies over time and across countries, depending on the relative importance of the two types of shocks. Our empirical evidence is based on pre- and postwar periods in the United States, as well as the postwar period in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany.
We provide a simple binomial framework to value American-style derivatives subject to trading restrictions. The optimal investment of liquid wealth is solved simultaneously with the early exercise decision of the nontraded derivative. No-short-sales constraints on the underlying asset manifest themselves in the form of an implicit dividend yield in the risk-neutralized process for the underlying asset. One consequence is that American call options may be optimally exercised prior to maturity even when the underlying asset pays no dividends. Applications to executive stock options (ESO) are presented: it is shown that the value of an ESO could be substantially lower than that computed using the Black–Scholes model. We also analyze nontraded payoffs based on a price that is imperfectly correlated with the price of a traded asset.
In many real-world situations, agents must formulate option exercise strategies with imperfect information. In such a setting, agents may infer the private signals of other agents through their observed exercise strategies. The building of an office building, the drilling of an exploratory oil well, and the commitment of a pharmaceutical company toward the research of a new drug all convey private information to other market participants. This article develops an equilibrium framework for option exercise games with asymmetric private information. Many interesting aspects of the patterns of equilibrium exercise are analyzed. In particular, informational cascades, where agents ignore their private information and jump on the exercise bandwagon, may arise endogenously.
We analyze a unique dataset that includes the full demand schedules of 27 Israeli IPOs that were conducted as nondiscriminatory (uniform price) auctions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the whole demand schedule for any asset is described. The demand schedules are relatively flat around the auction clearing price: The average elasticity is 27. The elasticity is low when the return distribution contains a large unique component. We also find a significant average abnormal return of 4.5% on the first trading day and a positive correlation between the abnormal return and the elasticity of demand.
This article documents the fact that when debtors decide to default on their obligations too early, it is in the creditors' collective interest, as residual claimants, to make concessions prior to forcing a costly liquidation. Symmetrically, when debtors prefer to default at an inefficiently late stage, it is in the creditors' interest to propose a departure from the absolute priority rule. This article develops a continuous time pricing model of dynamic debt restructuring that reflects the crucial influence of the two counterparties' relative bargaining power. Simple and intuitive path-dependent pricing formulae are derived for equity and debt. The debt capacity as well as the evolution of the firm's capital structure throughout its existence is provided.
In contrast to previous literature, we argue that are two types of poorly performing firms going private through a leveraged buyout (LBO). One group consists of firms in which managers own an insignificant fraction of their firm's stock and are vulnerable to a hostile takeover. The other group consists of firms in which managers own a significant fraction of their firm's stock and so face little risk of hostile takeover. Our evidence indicates that there are two such groups of LBOs and that their motivations and posttransaction actions are different.
The prospect of introducing securitization to a novice — whether it be a newly minted graduate of business or law school, or a seasoned CFO of a corporation that is considering its first securitization — is daunting. The elegance of the theoretical concept becomes quickly mired in the interdependent demands of accounting, taxation, bankruptcy and securities laws, and the ever-changing contours of the investor marketplace as soon as the novice begins to ask questions. Successful completion of real-world securitization transactions requires not only cooperation among professionals in a variety of disciplines, but an intimate understanding of the parameters of those disciplines. The prospect of a primer that would provide a first glimpse of the contours of this terrain would be a welcome addition to the library of many a law firm, accounting firm, or investment bank. Alas, A Primer on Securitization, edited by Leon T. Kendall and Michael J. Fishman, is not that book. The primer is instead is a collection of essays by some of the pivotal players in the development of securitization over the last quarter century, drawn from an eight-week colloquium held in 1994 at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Each has a vantage point. Each has war stories. Each brings the vocabulary of its author's discipline to the attention of the novice. The essays function as introductory material in the sense that they expose the novice reader to a number of perspectives and, in so doing, to the terms, phrases, and trains of thought inherent in each.