Knowledge that Transforms

I identify intraday jumps and cojumps in exchange rates controlling for volatility patterns and relate these events to pre-scheduled macroeconomic news and market conditions. Event study results show that preceding jump and cojump events, exchange rate quote volume, illiquidity, signed order flow, and informed trades are at heightened levels revealing that jump events are consistent with rational dealer quoting behavior. Following jump and cojump events, quote volume and return variance remain at heightened levels while illiquidity, informed trade, and signed order flow remain at depressed levels providing evidence that order flow following jump events is largely uninformed liquidity provision.

Consistent with Bayesian learning models, I find that two types of uncertainty—market uncertainty and firm-signal uncertainty—have opposite effects on investors’ learning from new information. I provide novel evidence that investor learning increases with the level of prior market uncertainty and decreases with firm-signal uncertainty (i.e., signal precision). Specifically, I find that the stock price response to earnings announcements increases with market volatility and decreases with earnings volatility. The results indicate that investor learning increases linearly with market uncertainty and decreases nonlinearly with firm-signal uncertainty. The effect of market uncertainty is stronger for large firms, firms with more market information in their returns, and firms with more institutional ownership.

This paper examines the relation between the degree and type of strategic interaction among industry firms and firm performance. As a measure of firm performance, we use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to estimate the efficiency of a firm relative to the ‘best practice’ firms in its industry. We find that firms in industries with higher levels of strategic interaction are less efficient and the negative relation is more pronounced in industries where firms compete in strategic substitutes. This finding is consistent with the idea that there is significantly more cooperation (tacit collusion) under strategic complements than strategic substitutes. We also find that frontier efficiency methodology outperforms other measures of firm performance in explaining the relation between strategic interaction and firm performance.

We examine changes in debt structure when firms experience financial distress. At these points in time, firms refinance and undergo substantial changes in priority structure. Specifically, we find that firms diversify their priority structure relative to its pre-distress composition. We show, using a simple model, that these changes are the firm's optimal response to its joint liquidity and investment needs. Additional predictions on the yield spreads of bonds issued to meet the firm's liquidity needs are also supported by the data.

We analyze the after-swap mix of fixed and floating rate debt in a sample of non-financial firms, using hand-collected data from a window of time when derivative positions were included in accounting disclosures. To motivate the analyses, we present a simple theoretical model that highlights the special features of interest rate risk. Consistent with the theory, we find that firms that issue more fixed rate debt have higher liquidity ratios and lower operating income ratios. We also document that individual firms actively vary the proportion of their fixed rate debt to a strikingly high extent. There is a debate as to whether such variation should be interpreted as hedging or speculation. We show that the firms more actively varying their debt mix respond to different hedging motives than those with low activity. We then empirically motivate an alternative indicator of speculative activity: co-variation between ex-post profitability of financial decisions and operating results.

This paper investigates the relationship between subjective financial literacy, i.e. self-reported by investors, and trading behavior. In particular, we use the level of financial knowledge and experience reported in the MiFID tests by retail investors. Such tests are implemented in the EU from the so-called Markets in Financial Instruments Directive since November 2007. We show that subjective financial literacy helps explain cross-sectional variations in retail investors’ behavior. Investors who report higher levels of financial literacy seem to invest smarter, even after controlling for gender, age, portfolio value, trading experience and education. They trade more and are less prone to the disposition effect. They tend to concentrate their portfolios on a small set of stocks and achieve diversification through investment funds holding. Their trading behaviors allow them to display higher gross and net returns as well as higher excess Sharpe ratios. Our findings are relevant for both policy making and understanding retail investors’ behavior.

We provide strong evidence that the dispersion of individual stock options trading volume across moneynesses (IDISP) contains valuable information about future stock returns. Stocks with high IDISP consistently underperform those with low IDISP by more than 1% per month. In line with the idea that IDISP reflects dispersion in investors’ beliefs, we find that the negative IDISP-return relationship is particularly pronounced around earnings announcements, in high sentiment periods and among stocks that exhibit relatively high short-selling impediments. Moreover, the IDISP effect is highly persistent and robustly distinct from the effects of a large array of previously documented cross-sectional return predictors.

This paper studies a model of endogenous bank opacity. Why do banks choose to hide their risk exposure from the public? And should policy makers force banks to be more transparent? In the model, bank opacity is costly because it encourages banks to take on too much risk. But opacity also reduces the incidence of bank runs (for a given level of risk taking). Banks choose to be inefficiently opaque if the composition of their asset holdings is proprietary information. In this case, policy makers can improve upon the market outcome by imposing public disclosure requirements (such as Pillar Three of Basel II). However, full transparency maximizes neither efficiency nor stability. The model can explain why empirically a higher degree of bank competition leads to increased transparency.

We examine stock and bond market reactions to the key events leading to the passage of the Dodd–Frank Act to assess the markets’ expectations about the effectiveness of the Act on systemically important financial firms. Using small/medium sized domestic financial institutions as a control group, we find that large financial institutions overall had negative abnormal stock returns and positive abnormal bond returns, suggesting that the markets expect the Act to be effective in reducing these banks’ risk-taking. We further investigate the market reactions for (1) larger and more interconnected financial institutions; and (2) the Big 6 banks to evaluate the markets’ assessment about the effectiveness of the act in ending the too-big-to-fail policy. We document that larger and more interconnected financial institutions experienced more negative abnormal stock returns and more positive abnormal bond returns as compared to other banks in our sample, but these relations are not present during the final phase of the passage. Likewise, we find that both shareholders and bondholders of the Big 6 banks initially experienced significant negative returns, followed by insignificant returns during the final phase of the passage. These results appear to suggest the markets are doubtful about the effectiveness of the final version of the bill to end the too-big-to-fail status in particular for the Big 6 banks.

Using supervisory data from U.S. financial institutions on fraud-related losses in foreign markets, we find that losses in countries with poor governance have lower recovery rates. Our results are robust to accounting for potential endogeneity and reverse causality concerns, among numerous robustness checks. The association is driven by intuitive governance dimensions such as control of corruption, rule of law, regulatory quality and government effectiveness. In addition, country governance plays a particularly important role in fraud recovery for firms with poor risk management quality. Overall, this paper presents unique and novel evidence tying country governance quality to firm-level risk realizations.