Knowledge that Transforms

Over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets dominate trading in many asset classes. Will electronic trading displace traditional OTC “voice” trading? Can electronic and voice systems coexist? What types of securities and trades are best suited for electronic trading? We study these questions by focusing on an innovation in electronic trading technology that enables investors to simultaneously search many bond dealers. We show that periodic one‐sided electronic auctions are a viable and important source of liquidity even in inactively traded instruments. These mechanisms are a natural compromise between bilateral search in OTC markets and continuous double auctions in electronic limit order books.

We document how a positive shock to investment opportunities at one plant (“treated plant”) spills over to other plants within the same firm, but only if the firm is financially constrained. To provide the treated plant with resources, the firm's headquarters withdraws capital and labor from other plants, especially plants that are relatively less productive, not part of the firm's core industries, and located far away from headquarters. As a result of the resource reallocation, aggregate firm‐wide productivity increases. We do not find evidence of capital or labor spillovers among plants of financially unconstrained firms.

Most banks pay corporate income taxes, but securitization vehicles do not. Our model shows that, when a bank faces strong loan demand but limited deposit market power, this tax asymmetry creates an incentive to sell loans despite less‐efficient screening and monitoring of sold loans. Moreover, loan‐selling increases as a bank's corporate income tax rate and capital requirement rise. Our empirical tests show that U.S. commercial banks sell more of their mortgages when they operate in states that impose higher corporate income taxes. A policy implication is that tax‐induced loan‐selling will rise if banks’ required equity capital increases.

Short‐termism need not breed informational price inefficiency even when generating beauty contests. We demonstrate this claim in a two‐period market with persistent liquidity trading and risk‐averse, privately informed, short‐term investors and find that prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors engage in “retrospective” learning to reassess inferences (about fundamentals) made during the trading game's early stages. This behavior introduces strategic complementarities in the use of information and can yield two stable equilibria that can be ranked in terms of liquidity, volatility, and informational efficiency. We derive implications that explain market anomalies as well as empirical regularities.

We find that connections CEOs develop with top executives and directors through their appointment decisions increase the risk of corporate fraud. Appointment‐based CEO connectedness in executive suites and boardrooms increases the likelihood of committing fraud and decreases the likelihood of detection. Additionally, it decreases the expected costs of fraud by helping conceal fraudulent activity, making CEO dismissal less likely upon discovery, and lowering the coordination costs of carrying out illegal activity. Connections based on network ties through past employment, education, or social organization memberships have insignificant effects on fraud. Appointment‐based CEO connectedness warrants attention from regulators, investors, and corporate governance specialists.

This paper investigates whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and the extent to which their skill is impacted by the venture capital (VC) firm where they work. We examine a unique data set that tracks the performance of individual venture capitalists' investments over time and as they move between firms. We find evidence of skill and exit style differences even among venture partners investing at the same VC firm at the same time. Furthermore, our estimates suggest the partners' human capital is two to five times more important than the VC firm's organizational capital in explaining performance.

Can banks maintain their advantage as liquidity providers when exposed to a financial crisis? While banks honored credit lines drawn by firms during the 2007 to 2009 crisis, this liquidity provision was only possible because of explicit, large support from the government and government‐sponsored agencies. At the onset of the crisis, aggregate deposit inflows into banks weakened and their loan‐to‐deposit shortfalls widened. These patterns were pronounced at banks with greater undrawn commitments. Such banks sought to attract deposits by offering higher rates, but the resulting private funding was insufficient to cover shortfalls and they reduced new credit.

This paper develops a model with a tractable log‐linear equilibrium to analyze the effects of informational frictions in commodity markets. By aggregating dispersed information about the strength of the global economy among goods producers whose production has complementarity, commodity prices serve as price signals to guide producers' production decisions and commodity demand. Our model highlights important feedback effects of informational noise originating from supply shocks and futures market trading on commodity demand and spot prices. Our analysis illustrates the weakness common in empirical studies on commodity markets of assuming that different types of shocks are publicly observable to market participants.

Leverage cross‐sections more than a few years apart differ markedly, with similarities evaporating as the time between them lengthens. Many firms have high and low leverage at different times, but few keep debt‐to‐assets ratios consistently above 0.500. Capital structure stability is the exception, not the rule, occurs primarily at low leverage, and is virtually always temporary, with many firms abandoning low leverage during the post‐war boom. Industry‐median leverage varies widely over time. Target‐leverage models that place little or no weight on maintaining a particular ratio do a good job replicating the substantial instability of the actual leverage cross‐section.

Effective monitoring by equity blockholders is important for good corporate governance. A prominent theoretical literature argues that the threat of block sale (“exit”) can be an effective governance mechanism. Many blockholders are money managers. We show that, when money managers compete for investor capital, the threat of exit loses credibility, weakening its governance role. Money managers with more skin in the game will govern more successfully using exit. Allowing funds to engage in activist measures (“voice”) does not alter our qualitative results. Our results link widely prevalent incentives in the ever‐expanding money management industry to the nature of corporate governance.