Knowledge that Transforms

This study evaluates the tax-loss-selling hypothesis against the window-dressing hypothesis as explanations for the turn-of-the-year return anomalies. We examine differences between securities dominated by individual investors versus those dominated by institutional investors and find that the effect is more pervasive in the former. Controlling for capitalization, we find that in early January, stocks with greater individual investor interest outperform stocks with greater institutional investor interest. These results hold for both stocks that previously appreciated in value and stocks that previously depreciated in value. The results are most consistent with the tax-loss-selling hypothesis as an explanation for the turn-of-the-year effect.

We use a robust regression estimator to analyze the risk premia on size and book-to-market. We find that the risk premium on size that was estimated by Fama and French (1992) completely disappears when the 1% most extreme observations are trimmed each month. We also show that the negative average of the monthly size coefficients reported by Fama and French can be entirely explained by the 16 months with the most extreme coefficients. We argue that further investigation of these results could lead to an understanding of the economic forces underlying the size effect, and may also yield important insights into how firms grow.

Duffie (1996) examines the theoretical impact of repo “specials” on the prices of Treasury securities and concludes that, all else the same, an issue on special will carry a higher price than an otherwise identical issue. We examine this hypothesis and find strong evidence in support of it. We also examine whether the liquidity premium associated with “on-the-run” issues is due to repo specialness and find evidence of a distinct effect. Finally, we investigate whether auction tightness and percentage awarded to dealers are related to subsequent specialness and find that both variables àre generally significant.

Commercial paper sells at an extra discount if it matures in the next calendar year but Treasury bills do not. The discount is apparent in downward price shifts before the year-end, and upward price shifts at the turn of the year that are significantly correlated with the simultaneous returns to small stocks, and that cannot reflect tax-loss selling. Cross-sectional and time-series tests on prices, as well as low of funds evidence on trades by institutional investors, indicate that both the debt and equity patterns reflect agency problems related to portfolio disclosures.

This article examines incentives for adopting antitakeover charter amendments (ATAs) that are associated with compensation contracts. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that antitakeover measures such as ATAs help managers protect above-market levels of compensation. Chief executive officers (CEOs) of firms that adopt ATAs receive higher salaries and more valuable option grants than CEOs at similar firms that do not adopt them. Furthermore, the magnitude of this difference increases following ATA adoption. The evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that ATAs facilitate the writing of efficient compensation contracts.

We compare initial offer prices in privatizations to initial prices in public offerings of private companies. The evidence indicates that government officials in the United Kingdom underprice IPOs significantly more than their private company counterparts. In Canada and Malaysia, however, the opposite is true. There does not appear to be a general tendency for privatizations to be underpriced to a greater degree than private company IPOs. We provide additional evidence on the determinants of privatization initial returns. Our findings indicate that initial returns are significantly higher in relatively primitive capital markets and for privatized companies in regulated industries.

We investigate the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the relative pricing of U.S. Treasury bonds. We obtain positive statistically and economically significant estimates for the implicit tax rates of a “representative” investor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After the 1986 Tax Reform, the point estimates for the tax rate are close to zero. Tests for a regime shift associated with the 1986 Tax Reform support the hypothesis that this event largely eliminated tax effects from the term structure. We discuss both institutional and statutory explanations for this change.

The double taxation of corporate income should discourage firms from incorporating. We investigate the extent to which the aggregate allocation of assets and taxable income in the United States between corporate and noncorporate firms responds to the size of this tax distortion during the period 1959–1986. In theory, profitable firms should shift out of the corporate sector when the tax distortion is large, and conversely for firms with tax losses. Our empirical results provide strong support for these forecasts, and imply that the resulting excess burden equals 16 percent of business tax revenue.

This study provides evidence that transactions costs discourage debt reductions by financially distressed firms when they restructure their debt out of court. As a result, these firms remain highly leveraged and one-in-three subsequently experience financial distress. Transactions costs are significantly smaller, hence leverage falls by more and there is less recurrence of financial distress, when firms recontract in Chapter 11. Chapter 11 therefore gives financially distressed firms more flexibility to choose optimal capital structures.