Knowledge that Transforms

When homogeneous or closely-linked securities trade in multiple markets, it is often of interest to determine where price discovery (the incorporation of new information) occurs. This article suggests an econometric approach based on an implicit unobservable efficient price common to all markets. The information share associated with a particular market is defined as the proportional contribution of that market's innovations to the innovation in the common efficient price. Applied to quotes for the thirty Dow stocks, the technique suggests that the preponderance of the price discovery takes place at the New York Stock Exchange (a median 92.7 percent information share).

This article examines the performance of 197 public companies that emerged from Chapter 11. Over 40 percent of the sample firms continue to experience operating losses in the three years following bankruptcy; 32 percent reenter bankruptcy or privately restructure their debt. The continued involvement of prebankruptcy management in the restructuring process is strongly associated with poor postbankruptcy performance. The substantial number of firms emerging from Chapter 11 that are not viable or need further restructuring provides little evidence that the process effectively rehabilitates distressed firms and is consistent with the view that there are economically important biases toward continuation of unprofitable firms.

Several recent studies suggest that equity mutual fund managers achieve superior returns and that considerable persistence in performance exists. This study utilizes a unique data set including returns from all equity mutual funds existing each year. These data enables the author to more precisely examine performance and the extent of survivorship bias. In the aggregate, funds have underperformed benchmark portfolios both after management expenses and even gross of expenses. Survivorship bias appears to be more important than other studies have estimated. Moreover, while considerable performance persistence existed during the 1970s, there was no consistency in fund returns during the 1980s.

The authors use the term structure of futures prices to test whether investors anticipate mean reversion in spot asset prices. The empirical results indicate mean reversion in each market they examine. For agricultural commodities and crude oil, the magnitude of the estimated mean reversion is large; for example, point estimates indicate that 44 percent of a typical spot oil price shock is expected to be reversed over the subsequent eight months. For metals, the degree of mean reversion is substantially less but still statistically significant. The authors detect only weak evidence of mean reversion in financial asset prices. Coauthors are Jay F. Coughenour, Paul J. Seguin, and Margaret Monroe Smoller.

Since people can hold currency at a zero nominal interest rate, the nominal short rate cannot be negative. The real interest rate can be and has been negative, since low risk real investment opportunities like filling in the Mississippi delta do not guarantee positive returns. The inflation rate can be and has been negative, most recently (in the United States) during the Great Depression. The nominal short rate is the 'shadow real interest rate' (as defined by the investment opportunity set) plus the inflation rate, or zero, whichever is greater. Thus the nominal short rate is an option. Longer term interest rates are always positive, since the future short rate may be positive even when the current short rate is zero. We can easily build this option element into our interest rate trees for backward induction or Monte Carlo simulation: just create a distribution that allows negative nominal rates, and then replace each negative rate with zero.

The authors' examination of the cross-section of expected returns reveals economically and statistically significant compensation (about 6 to 9 percent per annum) for beta risk when betas are estimated from time-series regressions of annual portfolio returns on the annual return on the equally weighted market index. The relation between book-to-market equity and returns is weaker and less consistent than that in Fama and French (1992). The authors conjecture that past book-to-market results using COMPUSTAT data are affected by a selection bias and provide indirect evidence.

The thrust of current deposit insurance reform–risk-based insurance premiums and capital requirements–is an effort to price deposit insurance more fairly. Fairly pricing deposit insurance eliminates inequitable wealth transfers but it does not lead to an efficient equilibrium. This paper shows that an alternative charter policy results in an efficient separating equilibrium.

The relationship between asset demand and information quality in rational expectations economies is analyzed. First the authors derive a number of new summary descriptive statistics that measure four basic characteristics of investment style: asset selection, market timing, aggressiveness, and specialization. Then they relate these statistics to the divergence between a given investor's information structure and the market average information structure. Finally, the authors demonstrate that informational differentials can be identified and consistently estimated, using ordinary least squares, from the time-series of observed asset demand.

This article examines changes in supermarket prices in local markets following supermarket leveraged buyouts (LBOs). The author finds that prices rise following LBOs in local markets in which the LBO firm's rivals are also highly leveraged and that LBO firms have higher prices than their less leveraged rivals, suggesting that LBOs create incentives to raise prices. However she also finds that prices fall following LBOs in local markets in which rival firms have low leverage and are concentrated. These price drops are associated with LBO firms exiting the local market suggesting that rivals attempt to 'prey' on LBO chains.

The authors investigate the conditional covariances of stock returns using bivariate exponential ARCH models. These models allow market volatility, portfolio-specific volatility, and beta to respond asymmetrically to positive and negative market and portfolio returns, i.e., 'leverage' effects. Using monthly data, the authors find strong evidence of conditional heteroscedasticity in both market and nonmarket components of returns, and weaker evidence of time-varying conditional betas. Surprisingly, while leverage effects appear strong in the market component of volatility, they are absent in conditional betas and weak and/or inconsistent in nonmarket sources of risk.