Knowledge that Transforms

Most current empirical work finds no evidence that money shocks lower interest rates. We show that these nonresults are mainly due to a failure to model the conditional heteroskedasticity of interest rates. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models find a significant liquidity effect where ordinary least squares (OLS) models do not. The existence of a liquidity effect is found using different models and sample periods when ARCH models are used in estimation, but never when OLS is employed.

This paper presents an econometric model to value latent information underlying corporate events. This model computes the market's inference of the value of latent information from the probability of an event, conditional on firm-specific, preevent information. It provides a convenient framework for testing significance of preevent information variables, such as accounting attributes and lagged stock return. Simulations show that this model, when applied to both event and preevent period data, can decrease the incidence of bias in event studies. If restricted to only event period data, this model reduces to a truncated regression and does not perform as well as standard procedures.

This paper uses the betting market for professional basketball games to address the issue of unexplained asset price volatility. A pricing model is presented which identifies two components in point spreads for professional basketball games. Both components—the market's estimate of relative team abilities and an idiosyncratic factor—are essentially unobserved, but can be identified ex post. The structure of this market enables tests of competing hypotheses about point spread variation. The tests reject the hypothesis that variation in the two components represents irrelevant noise. The hypothesis that unobserved fundamentals account for this variation is consistent with the data.

This study tests the tax-induced trading hypothesis as an explanation of the turn-of-the-year anomaly using Canadian and U.S. intraday data. Since the Canadian tax year-end precedes the calendar year-end by five business days, tax effects may be isolated. We find the anomaly is related to the degree of seller-and buyer-initiated trading and depends upon the incidence of the taxation year-end. Seller-initiated transactions (at bid prices) dominate until the tax year-end after which buyer-initiated trades (at ask prices) dominate. The anomaly is a function of bid-ask prices.

We show that for certain capital structures equity has an incentive to buy out another claim and alter the firm's investment strategy so as to maximize the combined value of equity and the acquired claim. This restructuring may reintroduce agency problems into capital structures which appear to avoid agency conflicts. By bundling claims, it is possible to avoid this agency problem. The agency problem is also eliminated by dispersed ownership of the claims.

In principle, the set of attainable payoff vectors is reduced if assets cannot be sold short. However, we show that the original space of payoff vectors is spanned despite short sale restrictions if there is one additional asset whose payoff is a positively weighted sum of the payoffs of the original assets. For example, this condition is automatically fulfilled if the original assets are stocks and the additional asset is an index future consisting of these stocks.