Knowledge that Transforms

American corporations earn a significant share of their profits from foreign sources, out of which they appear to pay dividends at rates that are three times higher than their payout rates from domestic profits. Why firms do so is unclear, although this behavior is consistent with the use of dividends to signal profitability. This payout behavior implies that a significant part of the U.S. tax revenue generated by the foreign profits of U.S. corporations arises through the taxation of dividends received by individuals and that the cost of capital may be higher for foreign than for domestic operations.

This article examines a model in which decisions are made at fixed intervals and are unsynchronized across agents. Agents choose nondurable consumption and portfolio composition, and either or both can be chosen infrequently. A small utility cost is associated with both decisions being made infrequently. Calibrating returns to the U.S. economy, less frequent and unsynchronized decision-making delivers the low volatility of aggregate consumption growth and its low correlation with equity return found in U.S. data. Allowing portfolio rebalancing to occur every period has a negligible impact on the joint behavior of aggregate consumption and returns.

This article examines a new database that details corporate risk management activity in the North American gold mining industry. The author finds little empirical support for the predictive power of theories that view risk management as a means to maximize shareholder value. However, firms whose managers hold more options manage less gold price risk, and firms whose managers hold more stock manage more gold price risk, suggesting that managerial risk aversion may affect corporate risk management policy. Further, risk management is negatively associated with the tenure of firms' CFOs, perhaps reflecting managerial interests, skills, or preferences.

The author generalizes the model of Michael F. Ferguson and Stephen R. Peters (1995) to allow for unequal recovery rates in the event of default by majority borrowers versus minority borrowers. This simple extension has two direct implications: (1) a uniform credit policy, as defined by Ferguson and Peters, entails cross-subsidization across groups; and (2) it is possible for a profit-maximizing (and therefore economically nondiscriminatory) lending policy to generate lower average default rates among minority borrowers than among majority borrowers.

Capital requirements linked solely to credit risk are shown to increase equilibrium credit rationing and lower aggregate lending. The model predicts that the bank's decision to lend will cause an abnormal run-up in the borrower's stock price and that this reaction will be greater the more capital-constrained the bank. The author provides empirical support for this prediction. The model explains the recent inability of the Federal Reserve to stimulate bank lending by increasing the money supply. He shows that increasing the money supply can either raise or lower lending when capital requirements are linked only to credit risk.

The authors examine corporate issuance and payout policies in the presence of both adverse selection (in capital markets) and managerial opportunism. Their results establish the importance of the locus of decision control in the firm. When shareholders determine policies, debt financing is always optimal in the presence of either adverse selection or managerial opportunism. However, when both of these problems are simultaneously present, equity issuance can become an optimal signaling mechanism. Shareholder's most preferred signaling mechanism is restricting dividends, followed by equity financing and, finally, underpricing securities. When managers determine policies, a reversed hierarchy may be obtained.

The authors explore how wheat spot and futures market volatility has been impacted by government farm programs during the 1950-93 period. They find that changing volatility in both markets is highly associated with changing farm programs. The mandatory allotment programs of the 1950s and early 1960s (1/3/50-4/10/64) were associated with low volatility, while the voluntary programs initiated in the mid-1960s seem to have induced high volatility (4/11/64-12/22/85). Both market-driven loan rates and conservation reserve programs appear to have helped volatility revert to lower levels since the mid-1980s (12/23/85-12/30/93). The authors also examine seasonality and causality in conjunction with the farm programs.

This article examines the relation between bank debt forgiveness and the structure of public debt exchange offers in financial distress. The author finds that the structure of exchange offers and the likelihood of an offer's success are significantly related to whether the bank participates in the restructuring transaction. Exchange offers made in conjunction with bank concessions are characterized by significantly greater reductions in public debt outstanding and significantly less senior debt offered to bondholders. Overall, the results suggest that the structure of a firm's public and private claims significantly affects the firm's ability to modify its capital structure in financial distress.

Previous research has shown that stocks with low prices relative to book value, cash flow, earnings, or dividends (that is, value stocks) earn high returns. Value stocks may earn high returns because they are more risky. Alternatively, systematic errors in expectations may explain the high returns earned by value stocks. The author tests for the existence of systematic errors using survey data on forecasts by stock market analysts. He shows that investment strategies that seek to exploit errors in analysts' forecasts earn superior returns because expectations about future growth in earnings are too extreme.

Most empirical studies of the static capital asset pricing model (CAPM) assume that betas remain constant over time and that the return on the value-weighted portfolio of all stocks is a proxy for the return on aggregate wealth. The general consensus is that the static CAPM is unable to explain satisfactorily the cross-section of average returns on stocks. The authors assume that the CAPM holds in a conditional sense, i.e., betas and the market risk premium vary over time. They include the return on human capital when measuring the return on aggregate wealth. The authors' specification performs well in explaining the cross-section of average returns.