Knowledge that Transforms

The availability of tax-exempt financing provides nonprofit (NP) organizations with their own tax-based incentives to issue debt. In this article, we develop a theoretical model in which NPs gain an indirect arbitrage from tax-exempt debt issuance, constrained by: 1) the requirement that fixed investment exceed tax-exempt debt flows (the project financing constraint), and 2) the constraint against share issuance. These constraints cause them to impute tax benefits to projects that afford access to the tax-exempt bond market. Empirical tests indicate that NP hospitals behave as if they have target levels of tax-exempt debt. Debt targeting is constrained by the availability of capital projects, while excess debt capacity stimulates investment.

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. Copyright 1996 by American Finance Association.

Bernard Dumas and Blaise A1laz exemplifies the objective of the series.Dumas and A1laz present a thorough and complete exposition of three important areas of modern finance: portfolio theory and asset pricing, option pricing, and fixed income valuation.

I examine the relative performance of call and continuous auctions under asymmetric information by manipulating trading rules and information sets in laboratory asset markets. I find significant differences in an environment that extends the Kyle (1985) framework to permit the exogenous liquidity trading motive to have a natural economic interpretation. The adverse selection costs incurred by noise traders are significantly lower under the call auction, despite no significant reduction in average price efficiency. This result suggests that discussions of the costs and benefits of insider trading should take place within the context of a specific trading mechanism.

ABSTRACT We analyze the effect of financing announcements of highly leveraged transactions (HLTs) on the stock prices of the banks that lead HLT‐lending syndicates. For our sample of 41 HLTs, we document that the first HLT and bank financing announcements result in positive wealth effects for the lending banks. We also find that these wealth effects are lower in 1985, for smaller HLTs, and for banks with a high loan loss reserve to total asset ratio. Finally, we report that Leveraged Buyout (LBO) targets gain about 2 percent, whereas leveraged recap targets lose about 2 percent, when the first bank financing agreement is announced.

We examine corporate issuance and payout policies in the presence of both adverse selection (in capital markets) and managerial opportunism. Our 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. Shareholders' 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.