Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT Records of over half a million participants in more than 600 401(k) plans indicate that participants tend to allocate their contributions evenly across the funds they use, with the tendency weakening with the number of funds used. The number of funds used, typically between three and four, is not sensitive to the number of funds offered by the plans, which ranges from 4 to 59. A participant's propensity to allocate contributions to equity funds is not very sensitive to the fraction of equity funds among offered funds. The paper also comments on limitations on inferences from experiments and aggregate‐level data analysis.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the market's reaction to U.K. insider transactions and analyzes whether the reaction depends on the firm's ownership. We present three major findings. First, differences in regulation between the U.K. and United States, in particular the speedier reporting of trades in the U.K., may explain the observed larger abnormal returns in the U.K. Second, ownership by directors and outside shareholders has an impact on the abnormal returns. Third, it is important to adjust for news released before directors' trades. In particular, trades preceded by news on mergers and acquisitions and CEO replacements contain significantly less information.

ABSTRACT Our paper explores a comprehensive sample of small and large corporate bankruptcies in Arizona and New York from 1995 to 2001. Bankruptcy costs are very heterogeneous and sensitive to the measurement method used. We find that Chapter 7 liquidations appear to be no faster or cheaper (in terms of direct expense) than Chapter 11 reorganizations. However, Chapter 11 seems to preserve assets better, thereby allowing creditors to recover relatively more. Our paper also provides a large number of further empirical regularities.

ABSTRACT We investigate whether mutual fund families strategically transfer performance across member funds to favor those more likely to increase overall family profits. We find that “high family value” funds (i.e., high fees or high past performers) overperform at the expense of “low value” funds. Such a performance gap is above the one existing between similar funds not affiliated with the same family. Better allocations of underpriced initial public offering deals and opposite trades across member funds partly explain why high value funds overperform. Our findings highlight how the family organization prevalent in the mutual fund industry generates distortions in delegated asset management.

ABSTRACT Using a database of more than 1.85 million retail investor transactions over 1991–1996, we show that these trades are systematically correlated—that is, individuals buy (or sell) stocks in concert. Moreover, consistent with noise trader models, we find that systematic retail trading explains return comovements for stocks with high retail concentration (i.e., small‐cap, value, lower institutional ownership, and lower‐priced stocks), especially if these stocks are also costly to arbitrage. Macroeconomic news and analyst earnings forecast revisions do not explain these results. Collectively, our findings support a role for investor sentiment in the formation of returns.

ABSTRACT This paper uses pre‐offer market valuations to evaluate the misvaluation and Q theories of takeovers. Bidder and target valuations (price‐to‐book, or price‐to‐residual‐income‐model‐value) are related to means of payment, mode of acquisition, premia, target hostility, offer success, and bidder and target announcement‐period returns. The evidence is broadly consistent with both hypotheses. The evidence for the Q hypothesis is stronger in the pre‐1990 period than in the 1990–2000 period, whereas the evidence for the misvaluation hypothesis is stronger in the 1990–2000 period than in the pre‐1990 period.

ABSTRACT We present a rational theory of SEOs that explains a pre‐issuance price run‐up, a negative announcement effect, and long‐run post‐issuance underperformance. When SEOs finance investment in a real options framework, expected returns decrease endogenously because growth options are converted into assets in place. Regardless of their risk, the new assets are less risky than the options they replace. Although both size and book‐to‐market effects are present, standard matching procedures fail to fully capture the dynamics of risk and expected return. We calibrate the model and show that it closely matches the primary features of SEO return dynamics.

ABSTRACT We consider a competitive and perfect financial market in which agents have heterogeneous cash flow valuations. Instead of assuming that agents are endowed with rational expectations, we model their behavior as the product of adaptive learning. Our results demonstrate that adaptive learning affects security design profoundly, with securities mispriced even in the long run and optimal designs trading off underpricing against intrinsic value maximization. The evolutionary dominant security design calls for issuing securities that engender large losses with a small but positive probability, but that otherwise produce stable payoffs, almost the exact opposite of the pure state claims that are optimal in the rational expectations framework.

ABSTRACT Immediately following an initial public offering, underwriters often repurchase shares of poorly performing offerings in an apparent attempt to stabilize the price. Using proprietary Nasdaq data, I study the price effects and determinants of price support. Some of the key findings are (1) Stabilization is substantial, inducing price rigidity at and below the offer price; (2) I find no evidence that stocks with larger information asymmetries are stabilized more strongly; (3) Larger underwriters stabilize more, perhaps to protect their reputations with investors; and (4) Investment banks with retail brokerage operations stabilize much more than other banks, inconsistent with the view that stabilization benefits primarily institutional investors.

ABSTRACT We examine whether equity‐linked private securities offerings are used as a mechanism for tunneling among firms that belong to a Korean chaebol. We find that chaebol issuers involved in intragroup deals set the offering prices to benefit their controlling shareholders. We also find that chaebol issuers (member acquirers) realize an 8.8% (5.8%) higher (lower) announcement return than do other types of issuers (acquirers) if they sell private securities at a premium to other member firms, and if the controlling shareholders receive positive net gains from equity ownership in issuers and acquirers. These results are consistent with tunneling within business groups.