Knowledge that Transforms

The aggregate volume of equity issues is used to search for periods when seasoned equity capital can be raised at favorable terms. The authors find that the price reaction to equity issue announcements in high equity issue volume periods is approximately 200 basis points lower on average than in low equity issue volume periods. The lower price reaction in hot markets is economically important and is independent of the macroeconomic characteristics of hot and cold markets. The evidence supports the existence of windows of opportunity for equity issues that result at least partially from reduced levels of asymmetric information.

This article develops an equilibrium framework for strategic option exercise games. The author focuses on a particular example: the timing of real estate development. An analysis of the equilibrium exercise policies of developers provides insights into the forces that shape market behavior. The model isolates the factors that make some markets prone to bursts of concentrated development. The model also provides an explanation for why some markets may experience building booms in the face of declining demand and property values. While such behavior is often regarded as irrational overbuilding, the model provides a rational foundation for such exercise patterns.

This paper develops an empirical return volatility-trading volume model from a microstructure framework in which informational asymmetries and liquidity needs motivate trade in response to information arrivals. The resulting system modifies the so-called 'mixture of distribution hypothesis' (MDH). The dynamic features are governed by the information flow, modeled as a stochastic volatility process, and generalize standard autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity specifications. Specification tests support the modified MDH representation and show that it vastly outperforms the standard MDH. The findings suggest that the model may be useful for analysis of the economic factors behind the observed volatility clustering in returns.

The authors analyze a multiperiod model of trading with differentially informed traders, liquidity traders, and a marketmaker. Each informed trader's initial information is a noisy estimate of the long-term value of the asset and the different signals received by informed traders can have a variety of correlation structures. With this setup, informed traders not only compete with each other for trading profits, they also learn about other traders' signals from the observed order flow. The authors' work suggests that the initial correlation among the informed traders' signals has a significant effect on the informed traders' profits and the informativeness of prices.

The ostensible purpose of the Basle Accord was to standardize bank-capital regulations among the twelve leading industrial countries. Its ulterior goal was to 'level the playing field' by eliminating a funding-cost advantage of Japanese banks that had allowed them to capture more than one-third of international lending. The wealth gain for Japanese bank shareholders was 31.63 percent. Wealth effects for shareholders of non-Japanese banks were not significant. These results suggest that the Baste Accord did not eliminate the pricing advantage of Japanese banks, challenging the non-Japanese regulators' contention that the regulation would help level the playing field.

Purchased order flow refers to the practice of dealers or trading locales paying brokers for retail order flow. It is alleged that such agreements are used to 'cream skim' uninformed liquidity trades, leaving the information-based trades to established markets. We develop a test of this hypothesis, using a model of the stochastic process of trades. We then estimate the model for a sample of stocks known to be used in order purchase agreements that trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Cincinnati Stock Exchange. Our main empirical result is that there is a significant difference in the information content of orders executed in New York and Cincinnati, and that this difference is consistent with cream-skimming.

Conrad and Kaul (1993) report that most of De Bondt and Thaler's (1985) long-term overreaction findings can be attributed to a combination of bid-ask effects when monthly cumulative average returns (CARs) are used, and price, rather than prior returns. In direct tests, we find little difference in test-period returns whether CARs or buy-and-hold returns are used, and that price has little predictive ability in cross-sectional regressions. The difference in findings between this study and Conrad and Kaul's is primarily due to their statistical methodology. They confound cross-sectional patterns and aggregate time-series mean reversion, and introduce a survivor bias. Their procedures increase the influence of price at the expense of prior returns.

A cash-in-advance model of a monetary economy is used to derive a money-based capital asset pricing model (M-CAPM), which allows the authors to implement tests of asset pricing restrictions without consumption data. A test as in Eugene F. Fama and James D. Macbeth (1973) of the model suggests that the money betas have some explanatory power for the cross-sectional variation of expected returns; however, the model is rejected using conditional information. Consistent with their predictions, estimates of the curvature parameter are lower than those of the consumption capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM) and pricing errors of the M-CAPM tend to be smaller than those of the C-CAPM.

This article explores the fundamental factors that affect cross-country stock return correlations. Using transactions data from 1988 to 1992, the authors construct overnight and intraday returns for a portfolio of Japanese stocks using their NYSE-traded American depository receipts and a matched-sample portfolio of U.S. stocks. They find that U.S. macroeconomic announcements, shocks to the yen/dollar foreign exchange rate and Treasury bill returns, and industry effects have no measurable influence on U.S. and Japanese return correlations. However, large shocks to broad-based market indices (Nikkei Stock Average and Standard and Poor's 500 Stock Index) positively impact both the magnitude and persistence of the return correlations.