Knowledge that Transforms

This article shows that some of the wealth gains from financial decisions involving changes in security form occur on predictable ex dates. For a sample of 113 spinoffs during 1964 to 1990, we document an average excess return of 3.0 percent on ex dates, roughly the same magnitude as the average announcement-date return. We conjecture that the spinoff ex-date return arises because the parent and subsidiary stocks attract different investors who prefer to buy the separated shares after the ex date. We also document that, on average, the target shareholders in stock-for-stock mergers earn an excess return of 1.5 percent on merger ex dates.

The authors develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival, with an emphasis on the intraday flows. The measure is the number of news releases by Reuter's News Service per unit of time. The authors find that public information arrival is nonconstant, displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns. Next they relate their measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity. The authors' results suggest a positive, moderate relationship between public information and trading volume but an insignificant relationship with price volatility.

This study compares the pre- and postprivatization financial and operating performance of sixty-one companies from eighteen countries and thirty-two industries that experience full or partial privatization through public share offerings during the period 1961 to 1990. The authors' results document strong performance improvements, achieved surprisingly without sacrificing employment security. Specifically, after being privatized, firms increase real sales, become more profitable, increase their capital investment spending, improve their operating efficiency, and increase their work forces. Furthermore, these companies significantly lower their debt levels and increase dividend payout. Finally, the authors document significant changes in the size and composition of corporate boards of directors after privatization.

This article examines the role of measurement biases, due to order flow effects, in abnormal split ex-day returns. The authors conjecture that postsplit orders consist of numerous small buyers and fewer larger sellers. This change in order flow causes closing prices to occur more frequently at the ask price, consistent with M. T. Maloney and J. H. Mulherin (1992) and M. Grinblatt and D. Keim (1991). In addition, this change causes specialists' spreads to increase, perhaps to offset larger average inventories. The authors examine both NYSE and NASDAQ samples and find that order flow biases can explain approximately 80 percent (48 percent) of the NYSE (NASDAQ) ex-day return.

Asymmetric information and conflicts of interest between equity and debt holders can force a distressed but efficient firm to liquidate and may enable a distressed inefficient firm to continue. In the extreme, if it is costless for an inefficient firm to mimic an efficient firm in a debt restructuring, efficient and inefficient firms are equally likely to continue or liquidate. This article shows that Chapter 11 procedures impose costs on inefficient firms that would otherwise mimic efficient firms. This separation induces voluntary filing for bankruptcy by inefficient firms and consequently enables efficient firms to continue when they would otherwise be liquidated.

The authors examine stock returns following large one-day price declines and find that the bid-ask bounce and the degree of market liquidity explain short-term price reversals. Further, they do not find evidence consistent with the overreaction hypothesis. The authors observe that securities with large one-day price declines perform poorly over an extended time horizon.

In this paper, the authors find significantly higher preholiday returns in futures contracts compared to nonholiday returns. The findings are consistent with the inventory adjustment hypothesis, since higher preholiday returns associated with lower trading volume are most pronounced for exchange-closed holidays. There is evidence of positive postholiday returns associated with higher trading volume for exchange-open holidays. This is consistent with positive holiday sentiments. The holiday effect is uniquely independent: the magnitude of excess holiday returns is the largest among all seasonal variations.

This article derives testable restrictions on equilibrium asset prices when investors have the option to time the realization of their capital gains and losses for tax purposes. The tax-timing option alters both the magnitude and timing of equity returns relative to those in a tax-free model. The tax-induced restrictions are empirically examined, and the tax rates and preference parameters are estimated. While the tax-free model can be rejected in favor of the tax-based model as the specified alternative, the tax-based model is still unable to adequately explain cross-sectional differences in asset returns.

This article presents general conditions under which it is possible to obtain asset pricing relations from the intertemporal optimal investment decision of the firm. Under the assumption of linear homogeneous production and adjustment cost functions, it is possible to establish, state by state, the equality between the return on investment and the market return of the financial claims issued by the firm. This result proves to be, in essence, robust to the consideration of very general constraints on investment and the inclusion of taxes.