Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT We provide a theory of informal communication—cheap talk—between firms and capital markets that incorporates the role of agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. The analysis suggests that a policy of discretionary disclosure that encourages managers to attract the market's attention when the firm is substantially undervalued can create shareholder value. The theory also relates the credibility of managerial announcements to the use of stock‐based compensation, the presence of informed trading, and the liquidity of the stock. Our results are consistent with the existence of positive announcement effects produced by apparently innocuous corporate events (e.g., stock dividends, name changes).

ABSTRACT This paper models transaction costs as the rents that a monopolistic market maker extracts from impatient investors who trade via limit orders. We show that limit orders are American options. The limit prices inducing immediate execution of the order are functionally equivalent to bid and ask prices and can be solved for various transaction sizes to characterize the market maker's entire supply curve. We find considerable empirical support for the model's predictions in the cross‐section of NYSE firms. The model produces unbiased, out‐of‐sample forecasts of abnormal returns for firms added to the S&P 500 index.

ABSTRACT This study documents a new value‐added role of venture capitalists and addresses important questions about how resources are combined to create firms. As part of the nexus of contracts surrounding a firm, strategic alliances can be viewed as relational contracts that blur firm boundaries. This paper provides evidence that alliances are more frequent among companies sharing a common venture capitalist. The effect is concentrated in alliances in which contracting problems are more pronounced, consistent with venture capitalists utilizing informational and other advantages in providing resources to firms. Further, these alliances improve the probability of exit for venture‐backed firms.

ABSTRACT We focus on public‐market investor participation to analyze the firm's decision to stay public or go private. The liquidity of public ownership is both a blessing and a curse: It lowers the cost of capital, but also introduces volatility in a firm's shareholder base, exposing management to uncertainty regarding shareholder intervention in management decisions, thereby affecting the manager's perceived decision‐making autonomy and curtailing managerial inputs. We extract predictions about how investor participation affects stock price level and volatility and the public firm's incentives to go private, providing a link between investor participation and firm participation in public markets.

ABSTRACT We use the information in collateralized debt obligations (CDO) prices to study market expectations about how corporate defaults cluster. A three‐factor portfolio credit model explains virtually all of the time‐series and cross‐sectional variation in an extensive data set of CDX index tranche prices. Tranches are priced as if losses of 0.4%, 6%, and 35% of the portfolio occur with expected frequencies of 1.2, 41.5, and 763 years, respectively. On average, 65% of the CDX spread is due to firm‐specific default risk, 27% to clustered industry or sector default risk, and 8% to catastrophic or systemic default risk.

ABSTRACTWe study the effect that a general lack of trust can have on stock market participation. In deciding whether to buy stocks, investors factor in the risk of being cheated. The perception of this risk is a function of the objective characteristics of the stocks and the subjective characteristics of the investor. Less trusting individuals are less likely to buy stock and, conditional on buying stock, they will buy less. In Dutch and Italian micro data, as well as in cross‐country data, we find evidence consistent with lack of trust being an important factor in explaining the limited participation puzzle.

ABSTRACT If firms adjust their capital structures toward targets, and if there are adverse selection costs associated with asymmetric information, how and when do firms adjust their capital structures? We suggest a financing needs‐induced adjustment framework to examine the dynamic process by which firms adjust their capital structures. We find that most adjustments occur when firms have above‐target (below‐target) debt with a financial surplus (deficit). These results suggest that firms move toward the target capital structure when they face a financial deficit/surplus—but not in the manner hypothesized by the traditional pecking order theory.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the determinants of corporate failure and the pricing of financially distressed stocks whose failure probability, estimated from a dynamic logit model using accounting and market variables, is high. Since 1981, financially distressed stocks have delivered anomalously low returns. They have lower returns but much higher standard deviations, market betas, and loadings on value and small‐cap risk factors than stocks with low failure risk. These patterns are more pronounced for stocks with possible informational or arbitrage‐related frictions. They are inconsistent with the conjecture that the value and size effects are compensation for the risk of financial distress.

ABSTRACT The anomalous returns associated with net stock issues, accruals, and momentum are pervasive; they show up in all size groups (micro, small, and big) in cross‐section regressions, and they are also strong in sorts, at least in the extremes. The asset growth and profitability anomalies are less robust. There is an asset growth anomaly in average returns on microcaps and small stocks, but it is absent for big stocks. Among profitable firms, higher profitability tends to be associated with abnormally high returns, but there is little evidence that unprofitable firms have unusually low returns.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the nature of default arrival and recovery implicit in the term structures of sovereign CDS spreads. We argue that term structures of spreads reveal not only the arrival rates of credit events , but also the loss rates given credit events. Applying our framework to Mexico, Turkey, and Korea, we show that a single‐factor model with following a lognormal process captures most of the variation in the term structures of spreads. The risk premiums associated with unpredictable variation in are found to be economically significant and co‐vary importantly with several economic measures of global event risk, financial market volatility, and macroeconomic policy.