Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the failures of 132 U.S. banks over the 2002–2009 period using discriminant analysis and successfully distinguish between banks that failed and those that didn’t 92% of the time using in-sample quarterly data. Our two most important variables are related to bank capital and loan quality, as one might expect; although bank profitability is also important. The resulting model is then used out-of-sample to examine the failure of 191 banks during 2010–11, with predictive accuracy in the 90–95% range. Our results demonstrate that our model can also easily be applied to a large number of firms (even those that don’t fail) and does an excellent job of distinguishing healthy from distressed banks. Combining this effectiveness with its ease of implementation makes it very functional. Such a model should be of obvious interest to regulators, analysts, and all those with a direct interest in assessing bank financial health.

We examine the impact of analyst coverage on corporate tax aggressiveness. To address endogeneity concerns, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis using a setting which causes exogenous decreases in analyst coverage. Our tests identify a negative causal effect of analyst coverage on tax aggressiveness, suggesting that higher analyst coverage constrains corporate tax aggressiveness. Further cross-sectional variation tests find that this constraining effect on tax aggressiveness is more pronounced in firms with lower investor recognition and firms with more opaque information environments. Our results are consistent with the notion that higher analyst coverage increases the visibility of aggressive tax planning behavior as well as heightens analysts’ demand for more transparent information, which in turn reduces tax aggressiveness.

This paper shows that firms talking less about the future in their annual reports generate positive abnormal returns of about 5% annually. I measure how much companies talk about the future in their annual 10-K reports by the frequency of the verbs will, shall, and going to. The evidence favors a risk-based interpretation: firms that use less future tense in their report offer higher returns since they are riskier. These results are consistent with finance theories stating that investors need to be rewarded for holding stocks of firms that put less information about the future in the marketplace.

An asymmetric information microstructural pricing model is proposed in which price responses to information and liquidity vary with every transaction. bid-ask quotes and price components account for learning by incorporating changing expectations of the rate of transacted volume (trading intensity) and the risk level of incoming trades. Analysis of European carbon futures transactions finds expected trading intensity to simultaneously increase the information component and decrease the liquidity component of price changes, but at different rates. This explains some conflicting results in prior literature. Further, the expected persistence in trading intensity explains the majority of the autocorrelations in the level and the conditional variance of price change; helps predict hourly patterns in returns, variance and the bid-ask spread; and differentiates the price impact of buy versus sell and continuing versus reversing trades.

We show that the introduction of a leverage constraint improves the practical implementation of characteristics-based portfolios. The addition of the constraint leads to significantly lower transaction costs, to a reduction of negative portfolio weights, and to a decrease in volatility and misspecification risk. Furthermore, it allows investors to implement any desired level of leverage. In this study, we include 12 characteristics, thereby extending the classical size, book-to-market and momentum paradigm. We report several key indicators such as the proportion of negative weights, Sharpe ratio, volatility, transaction costs, the transaction cost-adjusted certainty equivalent returns, and the Herfindahl–Hirschman index. Analyzing the sensitivity of these key indicators to the choice of multiple combinations of the 12 characteristics, to risk aversion, and to estimation sample size, we show that constrained policies are much less sensitive to these parameters than their unconstrained counterparts. Finally, for quadratic utility, we derive a semi-closed analytical form for the portfolio weights. Overall, we provide a comprehensive extension of characteristics-based portfolio choice and contribute to a better understanding and implementation of the allocation process.

This paper studies the role that risk and mispricing play in the negative relation between extreme positive returns and future returns. We document a strong ‘MAX effect’ in Australian equities over 1991–2013 that is robust to risk adjustment, controlling for other influential stock characteristics and, importantly, manifests in a partition of the 500 largest stocks. While there is no evidence that MAX proxies for sensitivity to risk, the findings are highly consistent with a mispricing explanation. Adapting the recent methodological innovation of Stambaugh et al. (2015) to classify stocks by their degree of mispricing, we show that the MAX effect concentrates amongst the most-overpriced stocks but actually reverses amongst the most-underpriced stocks. Consistent with arbitrage asymmetry, the magnitude of the MAX effect amongst overpriced stocks exceeds that amongst underpriced stocks, leading to the overall negative relation that has been well documented.

This paper investigates whether the reputation of non-CEO inside director matters in bank loan contracting. We posit that reputable inside directors (RIDs) can improve the quality of borrowers’ financial reporting and reduce agency risk in loan contracting. Based on a regression analysis of 5104 loan facilities during 1999–2007, we find that borrowers with RIDs enjoy lower loan interest rates and fewer restrictive covenants, and are less likely to have loans secured by collateral, than borrowers without RIDs. Our empirical results also show that RIDs help to obtain favorable loan terms mainly through alleviating ex-ante information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders. Further categorizing RIDs into CFO directors and other inside directors, we find that the effects of RIDs on loan spread and collateral requirements are significant for both CFO directors and other inside directors, while other inside directors have a more significant impact on financial covenants than CFO directors. Our findings are robust to controlling for RID characteristics and independent director reputation, and addressing the endogeneity concerns of RIDs, as well as the joint determination of various loan contracting terms.

We examine whether religion affects the terms of bank loans. We hypothesize that lenders value the traits of religious adherents, such as risk aversion, ethical behavior and honesty, and thus offer favorable loan terms to religious borrowers. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that corporate borrowers located in counties with a high level of religiosity are charged lower interest rates, have larger loan amounts and fewer loan covenants. These results suggest that the corporate culture of borrowers influences the availability and cost of bank loans.

Defining systematic risk management (SRM) skill as persistently low fund systematic risk, we find evidence of time varying allocation of hedge fund management effort across the business cycle. In weak market states, skilled managers focus on minimization of systematic risk via dynamic reallocations across asset classes at the cost of fund alpha and foregoing market timing opportunities. As markets strengthen, attention shifts to asset selection within consistent asset classes. The superior performance of low systematic risk funds previously documented arises due to the superior asset selection ability of managers in strong market states. Incremental allocations by investors arise due to this superior performance and not due to recognition of SRM skill.

Using a gravity model, we analyze the determinants of the probability that commercial banks in 89 acquiring countries and 118 target countries will undertake M&As over a 30-year period (1981–2010) and of the value of these M&As. We find that the value of cross-border M&As increases with the size of the acquiring country, and that both the probability and value of M&As vary positively with the depth of the financial market in acquirer countries and the presence of corporate and non-corporate customers from acquiring countries in target countries, and negatively with the geographic, psychic, and time zone distances between acquirer and target countries. Our study highlights the role of non-corporate customers and of psychic distance in the cross-border expansion of commercial banks through M&As.