Knowledge that Transforms

We use data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies to identify the ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms. We find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of these firms are widely held, in contrast to Berle and Means's image of ownership of the modern corporation. Rather, these firms are typically controlled by families or the State. Equity control by financial institutions is far less common. The controlling shareholders typically have power over firms significantly in excess of their cash flow rights, primarily through the use of pyramids and participation in management.

We investigate the bias in CRSP's Nasdaq data due to missing returns for delisted stocks. We find that the missing returns are large and negative on average, and that delisted stocks experience a substantial decrease in liquidity. We estimate that using a corrected return of −55 percent for missing performance‐related delisting returns corrects the bias. We revisit previous work which finds a size effect among Nasdaq stocks. After correcting for the delisting bias, there is no evidence that there ever was a size effect on Nasdaq. Our results are inconsistent with most risk‐based explanations of the size effect.

Non‐U.S. firms cross‐listing shares on U.S. exchanges as American Depositary Receipts earn cumulative abnormal returns of 19 percent during the year before listing, and an additional 1.20 percent during the listing week, but incur a loss of 14 percent during the year following listing. We show how these unusual share price changes are robust to changing market risk exposures and are related to an expansion of the shareholder base and to the amount of capital raised at the time of listing. Our tests provide support for the market segmentation hypothesis and Merton's (1987) investor recognition hypothesis.

We study the causes and effects of the competition for order flow by U.S. regional stock exchanges. We trace the origins of competition for order flow to a change in the role of regional exchanges from being venues for listing local securities to being more direct competitors for the order flow of NYSE listings. We study the way regionals competed for order flow, concentrating on a series of stock‐exchange mergers that occurred in the midst of this transition of the regional exchanges. The merging exchanges attracted market share and experienced narrower bid‐ask spreads.

Costs of equity for individual firms are estimated in a Bayesian framework using several factor‐based pricing models. Substantial prior uncertainty about mispricing often produces an estimated cost of equity close to that obtained with mispricing precluded, even for a stock whose average return departs significantly from the pricing model's prediction. Uncertainty about which pricing model to use is less important, on average, than within‐model parameter uncertainty. In the absence of mispricing uncertainty, uncertainty about factor premiums is generally the largest source of overall uncertainty about a firm's cost of equity, although uncertainty about betas is nearly as important.

We investigate investment managers' use of derivatives by comparing return distributions for equity mutual funds that use and do not use derivatives. In contrast to public perception, derivative users have risk exposure and return performance that are similar to nonusers. We also analyze changes in fund risk in response to prior fund performance. Changes in risk are substantially less severe for funds using derivatives, consistent with the explanation that managers use derivatives to reduce the impact of performance on risk. We provide new evidence regarding the implications of cash flows and managerial gaming for the relation between performance and risk.

In this paper, we point out that the widely used stochastic discount factor (SDF) methodology ignores a fully specified model for asset returns. As a result, it suffers from two potential problems when asset returns follow a linear factor model. The first problem is that the risk premium estimate from the SDF methodology is unreliable. The second problem is that the specification test under the SDF methodology has very low power in detecting misspecified models. Traditional methodologies typically incorporate a fully specified model for asset returns, and they can perform substantially better than the SDF methodology.

We examine whether mutual fund performance is related to characteristics of fund managers that may indicate ability, knowledge, or effort. In particular, we study the relationship between performance and the manager's age, the average composite SAT score at the manager's undergraduate institution, and whether the manager has an MBA. Although the raw data suggest striking return differences between managers with different characteristics, most of these can be explained by behavioral differences between managers and by selection biases. After adjusting for these, some performance differences remain. In particular, managers who attended higher‐SAT undergraduate institutions have systematically higher risk‐adjusted excess returns.

We provide a formal test of the liquidity preference hypothesis (LPH), that is, the monotonicity of ex ante term premiums, using nonparametric estimates that do not require a structural model for conditional expected returns. Although the point estimates of the term premiums are consistent with previous conclusions in the literature regarding violations of the LPH, the test statistics are generally insignificant, even when powerful conditioning information is used. These results illustrate the importance of correctly accounting for correlations across maturities and of formally testing the inequality restrictions implied by the LPH.