Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT Many believe that a bubble existed in Internet stocks in the 1999 to 2000 period, and that short‐sale restrictions prevented rational investors from driving Internet stock prices to reasonable levels. In the presence of such short‐sale constraints, option and stock prices could decouple during a bubble. Using intraday options data from the peak of the Internet bubble, we find almost no evidence that synthetic stock prices diverged from actual stock prices. We also show that the general public could cheaply short synthetically using options. In summary, we find no evidence that short‐sale restrictions affected Internet stock prices.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the choice of trading venue by dealers in U.S. Treasury securities to determine when services provided by human intermediaries are difficult to replicate in fully automated trading systems. When Treasury securities go “off the run” their trading volume drops by more than 90%. This decline in trading volume allows us to test whether intermediaries' knowledge of the market and its participants can uncover hidden liquidity and facilitate better matching of customer orders in less active markets. Consistent with this hypothesis, the market share of electronic intermediaries falls from 81% to 12% when securities go off the run.

ABSTRACT Traditional executive stock option plans allow fixed numbers of options to vest peri‐odically, independent of stock price performance. Because such options may climb deep in‐the‐money long before the manager can exercise them, they can exacerbate risk aversion in project selection. Making the proportion of options that vest a gradually increasing function of the stock price can ensure that appropriate numbers of options are retained while they provide risk‐taking incentives, but are exercised once they have lost their convexity. “Progressive performance vesting” can allow the firm more efficiently to rebalance the manager's risk‐taking incentives.

ABSTRACT Many models use noise trader risk and corresponding violations of the Law of One Price to explain pricing anomalies, but include a storage technology in perfectly elastic supply or unlimited asset liability. Storage allows aggregate consumption risk to differ from exogenous fundamental risk, but using aggregate consumption as a factor for asset returns can make noise trader risk superfluous. Using (i) limited asset liability and limited storage withdrawals, or (ii) an endogenous locally riskless interest rate eliminates violations of the Law of One Price. Our main results use only budget equations and market clearing, and require virtually no assumptions about behavior.

ABSTRACT There is ongoing debate about the apparent weak or negative relation between risk (conditional variance) and expected returns in the aggregate stock market. We develop and estimate an empirical model based on the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) that separately identifies the two components of expected returns, namely, the risk component and the component due to the desire to hedge changes in investment opportunities. The estimated coefficient of relative risk aversion is positive, statistically significant, and reasonable in magnitude. However, expected returns are driven primarily by the hedge component. The omission of this component is partly responsible for the existing contradictory results.

ABSTRACT This paper provides direct evidence supporting the tax‐loss selling hypothesis as an explanation of the January effect. Examining turn‐of‐the‐year return and volume patterns for municipal bond closed‐end funds, which are held mostly by tax‐sensitive individual investors, we document a January effect for these funds, but not for their underlying assets. We provide evidence that this effect can be largely explained by tax‐loss selling activities at the previous year‐end. Moreover, we find that funds associated with brokerage firms display more tax‐loss selling behavior, suggesting that tax counseling plays a role.

ABSTRACT I exploit sharply nonlinear funding rules for defined benefit pension plans in order to identify the dependence of corporate investment on internal financial resources in a large sample. Capital expenditures decline with mandatory contributions to DB pension plans, even when controlling for correlations between the pension funding status itself and the firm's unobserved investment opportunities. The effect is particularly evident among firms that face financing constraints based on observable variables such as credit ratings. Investment also displays strong negative correlations with the part of mandatory contributions resulting solely from unexpected asset market movements.

ABSTRACT We examine whether irrational behavior among small (retail) investors drives post‐IPO prices. We use prices from the grey market (the when‐issued market that precedes European IPOs) to proxy for small investors' valuations. High grey market prices (indicating overoptimism) are a very good predictor of first‐day aftermarket prices, while low grey market prices (indicating excessive pessimism) are not. Moreover, we find long‐run price reversal only following high grey market prices. This asymmetry occurs because larger (institutional) investors can choose between keeping the shares they are allocated in the IPO, and reselling them when small investors are overoptimistic.

ABSTRACT Firms in more concentrated industries earn lower returns, even after controlling for size, book‐to‐market, momentum, and other return determinants. Explanations based on chance, measurement error, capital structure, and persistent in‐sample cash flow shocks do not explain this finding. Drawing on work in industrial organization, we posit that either barriers to entry in highly concentrated industries insulate firms from undiversifiable distress risk, or firms in highly concentrated industries are less risky because they engage in less innovation, and thereby command lower expected returns. Additional time‐series tests support these risk‐based interpretations.

ABSTRACT We derive the optimal dynamic contract in a continuous‐time principal‐agent setting, and implement it with a capital structure (credit line, long‐term debt, and equity) over which the agent controls the payout policy. While the project's volatility and liquidation cost have little impact on the firm's total debt capacity, they increase the use of credit versus debt. Leverage is nonstationary, and declines with past profitability. The firm may hold a compensating cash balance while borrowing (at a higher rate) through the credit line. Surprisingly, the usual conflicts between debt and equity (asset substitution, strategic default) need not arise.