ABSTRACT I show that stock market shocks have important and lasting effects on the careers of MBAs. Stock market conditions while MBA students are in school have a large effect on whether they go directly to Wall Street upon graduation. Further, starting on Wall Street immediately upon graduation causes a person to be more likely to work there later and to earn, on average, substantially more money. The empirical results suggest that investment bankers are largely “made” by circumstance rather than “born” to work on Wall Street.
ABSTRACT We relate the property rights theory of the firm to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We first show that high market‐to‐book acquirers typically do not purchase low market‐to‐book targets. Instead, mergers pair together firms with similar ratios. We then build a continuous‐time model of investment and merger activity combining search, scarcity, and asset complementarity to explain this like buys like result. We test the model by relating like‐buys‐like to search frictions. Search frictions and assortative matching vary inversely, supporting the model over standard explanations.
ABSTRACT This paper documents that at the individual stock level, insiders' sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders' purchases peak only the month before a large jump. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric information. A key feature of our theory is that rational uninformed investors may react more strongly to the absence of insider sales than to their presence (the “dog that did not bark” effect). We test our hypothesis against competing stories, such as insiders timing their trades to evade prosecution.
ABSTRACT We study how foreign bank penetration affects financial sector development in poor countries. A theoretical model shows that when domestic banks are better than foreign banks at monitoring soft information customers, foreign bank entry may hurt these customers and worsen welfare. The model also predicts that credit to the private sector should be lower in countries with more foreign bank penetration, and that foreign banks should have a less risky loan portfolio. In the empirical section, we test these predictions for a sample of lower income countries and find support for the theoretical model.
ABSTRACT We use a comprehensive data set of funds‐of‐funds to investigate performance, risk, and capital formation in the hedge fund industry from 1995 to 2004. While the average fund‐of‐funds delivers alpha only in the period between October 1998 and March 2000, a subset of funds‐of‐funds consistently delivers alpha. The alpha‐producing funds are not as likely to liquidate as those that do not deliver alpha, and experience far greater and steadier capital inflows than their less fortunate counterparts. These capital inflows attenuate the ability of the alpha producers to continue to deliver alpha in the future.
ABSTRACT We construct a long daily panel of short sales using proprietary NYSE order data. From 2000 to 2004, shorting accounts for more than 12.9% of NYSE volume, suggesting that shorting constraints are not widespread. As a group, these short sellers are well informed. Heavily shorted stocks underperform lightly shorted stocks by a risk‐adjusted average of 1.16% over the following 20 trading days (15.6% annualized). Institutional nonprogram short sales are the most informative; stocks heavily shorted by institutions underperform by 1.43% the next month (19.6% annualized). The results indicate that, on average, short sellers are important contributors to efficient stock prices.
ABSTRACT We examine a primary outcome of corporate governance, namely, the ability to identify and terminate poorly performing CEOs, to test the effectiveness of U.S. investor protections in improving the corporate governance of cross‐listed firms. We find that firms from weak investor protection regimes that are cross‐listed on a major U.S. Exchange are more likely to terminate poorly performing CEOs than non‐cross‐listed firms. Cross‐listings on exchanges that do not require the adoption of stringent investor protections (OTC, private placements, and London listings) are not associated with a higher propensity to remove poorly performing CEOs.
ABSTRACT Fundamental information resembles in many respects a durable good. Hence, the effects of its incorporation into stock prices depend on who is the agent controlling its flow. Like a durable goods monopolist, a monopolistic analyst selling information intertemporally competes against herself. This forces her to partially relinquish control over the information flow to traders. Conversely, an insider solves the intertemporal competition problem through vertical integration, thus exerting tighter control over the information flow. Comparing market patterns I show that a dynamic market where information is provided by an analyst is thicker and more informative than one where an insider trades.
ABSTRACT Reversal is the current stylized fact of weekly returns. However, we find that an opposing and long‐lasting continuation in returns follows the well‐documented brief reversal. These subsequent momentum profits are strong enough to offset the initial reversal and to produce a significant momentum effect over the full year following portfolio formation. Thus, ex post, extreme weekly returns are not too extreme. Our findings extend to weekly price movements with and without public news. In addition, there is no relation between news uncertainty and the momentum in 1‐week returns.
ABSTRACT Both post‐repurchase abnormal returns and reported improvement in operating performance are driven, at least in part, by pre‐repurchase downward earnings management rather than genuine growth in profitability. The downward earnings management increases with both the percentage of the company that managers repurchase and CEO ownership. Pre‐repurchase abnormal accruals are also negatively associated with future performance, with the association driven mainly by those firms that report the largest income‐decreasing abnormal accruals. The study suggests that one reason firms experience post‐repurchase abnormal returns is that post‐repurchase realized earnings growth exceeds expectations formed on the basis of pre‐repurchase deflated earnings numbers.