Knowledge that Transforms

Using 947 acquisitions during 1970-89, this article finds a relationship between the postacquisition returns and the mode of acquisition and form of payment. During a five-year period following the acquisition, on average, firms that complete stock mergers earn significantly negative excess returns of -25.0 percent whereas firms that complete cash tender offers earn significantly positive excess returns of 61.7 percent. Over the combined preacquisition and postacquisition period, target shareholders who hold on to the acquirer stock received as payment in stock mergers do not earn significantly positive excess returns. In the top quartile of target to acquirer size ratio, they earn negative excess returns.

This work compares a dealer market and a limit-order book. Dealers commonly observe order flow and collect information from multiple market orders. They may be better informed than other traders, although they do not earn rents from this information. Dealers earn rents as suppliers of liquidity and their decisions to enter or exit the market are independent of the degree of adverse selection. Introduction of a limit-order book lowers the execution-price risk faced by speculators and leads them to trade more aggressively on their information. Introduction of the book also lowers dealer profits but increases the informational efficiency of prices.

The authors examine the relationship between stock prices and market segmentation induced by ownership restrictions in Mexico. The focus is on multiple classes of equity that differentiate between foreign and domestic traders, and between domestic individuals and institutions. Significant stock price premia are documented for shares not restricted to a particular investor group. The authors analyze the theoretical and empirical determinants of premia across firms and over time. In addition to economywide factors, segmentation reflects the relative scarcity of unrestricted shares. The results provide additional support for Rene Stulz and Walter Wasserfallen's (1995) hypothesis that firms discriminate between investor groups with different demand elasticities.

Yakov Amihud and Haim Mendelson (1986) and George Constantinides (1986) provide a theoretical basis for the proposition that assets with higher transactions costs are held by investors for longer holding periods, and vice versa. The authors examine average holding periods and bid-ask spreads for Nasdaq stocks from 1983 through 1991 and for New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks from 1975 through 1989 and find strong evidence that, as predicted, the length of investors' holding periods is related to bid-ask spreads. They also find that the relation between holding periods and bid-ask spreads is much stronger on Nasdaq, where spreads are larger, than on the NYSE, where spreads are smaller.

It is well documented that expected stock returns vary with the day of the week (the Monday or weekend effect). In this article, the authors show that the well-known Monday effect occurs primarily in the last two weeks (fourth and fifth weeks) of the month. In addition, the mean Monday return of the first three weeks of the month is not significantly different from zero. This result holds for most of the subperiods during the 1962-93 sampling period and for various stock return indexes. The monthly effect reported by Robert A. Ariel (1987) and Josef Lakonishok and Seymour Smidt (1988) cannot fully explain this phenomenon.

The higher taxation of dividends in the United States gave rise to theories that explain why companies pay dividends. Tax-based signaling models propose that the higher tax on dividends is a necessary condition to make them informative about companies' values. In Germany, where dividends are not tax-disadvantaged and in fact are taxed lower for most investor classes, these models predict that dividends are not informative. However, the authors find that the stock price reaction to dividend news in Germany is similar to that found in the United States. This suggests other reasons, beyond taxation, that make dividends informative.

This article investigates the behavior of the term structure of interest rates over the business cycle. In contrast to prior studies that measure the business cycle by the simple growth in aggregate economic activity, the authors consider the deviation of aggregate economic activity from its potentially stochastic trend. They show that incorporating both an independent trend and cyclical component in consumption improves the efficiency in estimating consumption-based asset pricing models. The authors also find that the term spread is more informative about future changes in stochastically detrended real gross domestic product (GDP) than future growth rates in real GDP.

The double taxation of corporate income should discourage firms from incorporating. The authors investigate the extent to which the aggregate allocation of assets and taxable income in the United States between corporate and noncorporate firms responds to the size of this tax distortion during the period 1959-86. In theory, profitable firms should shift out of the corporate sector when the tax distortion is large, and conversely for firms with tax losses. The authors' empirical results provide strong support for these forecasts and imply that the resulting excess burden equals 16 percent of business tax revenue.

This article examines the efficiency of the National Football League betting market. The standard ordinary least squares regression methodology is replaced by a probit model. This circumvents potential econometric problems, and allows the authors to implement more sophisticated betting strategies where bets are placed only when there is a relatively high probability of success. In-sample tests indicate that probit-based betting strategies generate statistically significant profits. Whereas the profitability of a number of these betting strategies is confirmed by out-of-sample testing, there is some inconsistency among the remaining out-of-sample predictions. The authors' results also suggest that widely documented inefficiencies in this market tend to dissipate over time.