For corporations facing tax‐function convexity, hedging lowers expected tax liabilities, thereby providing an incentive to hedge. We use simulation methods to investigate convexity induced by tax‐code provisions. On average, the tax function is convex (although in approximately 25 percent of cases it is concave). Carrybacks and carryforwards increase the range of income with incentives to hedge; other tax‐code provisions have minor impacts. Among firms facing convex tax functions, average tax savings from a five percent reduction in the volatility of taxable income are about 5.4 percent of expected tax liabilities; in extreme cases, these savings exceed 40 percent.
This paper presents an exact finite‐sample statistical procedure for testing hypotheses about the weights of mean‐variance efficient portfolios. The estimation and inference procedures on efficient portfolio weights are performed in the same way as for the coefficients in an OLS regression. OLS t ‐ and F ‐statistics can be used for tests on efficient weights, and when returns are multivariate normal, these statistics have exact t and F distributions in a finite sample. Using 20 years of data on 11 country stock indexes, we find that the sampling error in estimates of the weights of a global efficient portfolio is large.
Long‐term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule.
The valuation effect of diversification is examined for large samples of firms in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom for 1992 and 1994. We find no significant diversification discount in Germany, but a significant diversification discount of 10 percent in Japan and 15 percent in the U.K. Concentrated ownership in the hands of insiders enhances the valuation effect of diversification in Germany, but not in Japan or the U.K. For Japan, only firms with strong links to an industrial group have a diversification discount. These findings suggest that international differences in corporate governance affect the impact of diversification on shareholder wealth.
ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES in finance is what the factors are that affect expected return on assets, the sensitivity of expected return to those factors, and the reward for bearing this sensitivity.There is a long history of testing in this area, and it is clearly one of the most investigated areas in finance.Almost all of the testing I am aware of involves using realized returns as a proxy for expected returns.The use of average realized returns as a proxy for expected returns relies on a belief that information surprises tend to cancel out over the period of a study and realized returns are therefore an unbiased estimate of expected returns.However, I believe that there is ample evidence that this belief is misplaced.There are periods longer than 10 years during which stock market realized returns are on average less than the risk-free rate ~1973 to 1984!.There are periods longer than 50 years in which risky long-term bonds on average underperform the risk free rate ~1927 to 1981!. 1 Having a risky asset with an expected return above the riskless rate is an extremely weak condition for realized returns to be an appropriate proxy for expected returns, and 11 and 50 years is an awfully long time for such a weak condition not to be satisfied.In the recent past, the United States has had stock market returns of higher than 30 percent per year while Asian markets have had negative returns.Does anyone honestly believe that this is because this was the riskiest period in history for the United States and the safest for Asia?Furthermore, there is a large body of evidence we find anomalous.This includes the effect of inf lation on asset pricing and the failure of the generalized expectation theory to explain term premiums.Changing risk premiums and conditional asset pricing theories may be a way of "explaining" some of the anomalous results; however, this does not explain returns on risky assets that are less than the riskless rate for the long periods when it has occurred.It seems to me that the more logical explanation for these anomalous results is that realized returns are a very poor measure of expected returns and that information surprises highly inf luence a number of factors in our
We investigate the bias in CRSP's Nasdaq data due to missing returns for delisted stocks. We find that the missing returns are large and negative on average, and that delisted stocks experience a substantial decrease in liquidity. We estimate that using a corrected return of −55 percent for missing performance‐related delisting returns corrects the bias. We revisit previous work which finds a size effect among Nasdaq stocks. After correcting for the delisting bias, there is no evidence that there ever was a size effect on Nasdaq. Our results are inconsistent with most risk‐based explanations of the size effect.
Using a large sample of Japanese firm level data, we find that Japanese banks act primarily in the short term interests of creditors when dealing with firms outside bank groups. Corporate control mechanisms other than bank oversight appear necessary in these firms. When dealing with firms in bank groups, banks may act in the broader interests of a range of stakeholders, including shareholders. However, our findings are also consistent with banks “propping up” troubled bank group firms. We conclude that bank oversight need not lead to value maximizing corporate governance.
This study compares the pre‐ and postprivatization financial and operating performance of 85 companies from 28 industrialized countries that were privatized through public share offerings for the period from 1990 through 1996. We document significant increases in profitability, output, operating efficiency, and dividend payments—and significant decreases in leverage ratios—for our full sample of firms after privatization, and for most subsamples examined. Capital expenditures increase significantly in absolute terms, but not relative to sales. Employment declines, but insignificantly. Combined with results from two previous, directly comparable studies, these findings strongly suggest that privatization yields significant performance improvements.
We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership has risen from 13 percent for the universe of exchange‐listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in 1995. We examine in detail the robustness of the increase and explore hypotheses to explain it. Higher managerial ownership has not substituted for alternative corporate governance mechanisms. Lower volatility and greater hedging opportunities associated with the development of financial markets appear to be important factors explaining the increase in managerial ownership.
The arrival of public information in the U.S. Treasury market sets off a two‐stage adjustment process for prices, trading volume, and bid‐ask spreads. In a brief first stage, the release of a major macroeconomic announcement induces a sharp and nearly instantaneous price change with a reduction in trading volume, demonstrating that price reactions to public information do not require trading. The spread widens dramatically at announcement, evidently driven by inventory control concerns. In a prolonged second stage, trading volume surges, price volatility persists, and spreads remain moderately wide as investors trade to reconcile residual differences in their private views.