Knowledge that Transforms

Open-end equity funds provide a diversified equity positions with little direct cost to investors for liquidity. This study documents a statistically significant indirect cost in the form of a negative relation between a fund's abnormal return and investor flows. Controlling for this indirect cost of liquidity changes the average fund's abnormal return (net of expenses) from a statistically significant −1.6% per year to a statistically insignificant −0.2% and also fully explains the negative market-timing performance found in this and other studies of mutual fund returns. Thus, the common finding of negative return performance at open-end mutual funds is attributable to the costs of liquidity-motivated trading.

We present evidence that insured deposit financing shields banks from the full costs of market discipline. Moody's downgrades, indicators of increasing risk, are associated with negative abnormal equity returns that are increasing in the bank's reliance on insured deposits. Moreover, banks raise their use of insured deposits following increases in risk. These findings cast doubt on the ability of capital market participants to effectively discipline bank behavior within the current regulatory environment. More generally, our findings highlight the potential for regulation to undermine market discipline in regulated industries.

Previous research finds the volatility implied by S&P 100 index option prices to be a biased and inefficient forecast of future volatility and to contain little or no incremental information beyond that in past realized volatility. In contrast, we find that implied volatility outperforms past volatility in forecasting future volatility and even subsumes the information content of past volatility in some of our specifications. Our results differ from previous studies because we use longer time series and nonoverlapping data. A regime shift around the October 1987 crash explains why implied volatility is more biased in previous work.

Since prices are constrained to discrete tick multiples while dividends are essentially continuous, ex day price changes will not equal dividends. We argue that the expected price drop is strictly less than the dividend but within one tick of the dividend. The price-drop-to-dividend ratio will (i) be less than one, (ii) increase with dividends generally, and (iii) decline between tick multiples, giving a sawtooth pattern in the data. Since dividends and dividend yields are highly correlated, discreteness will give the impression of tax-induced dividend clienteles even if there are none. Taxable cash dividends and nontaxable stock dividends exhibit similar ex day behavior.

This study examines how order preferencing affects the competitiveness and efficiency of laboratory financial markets. We operationalize preferencing by allowing some dealers to execute a portion of the order flow by matching the most favorable quotes available. Increasing the proportion of order flow that is preferenced can increase bid–ask spreads, reduce the informational efficiency of prices, and benefit dealers at the expense of liquidity traders. Preferencing has none of these effects, however, when two or more dealers are not receiving preferencing orders. Preferencing may significantly degrade market performance if preferencing arrangements affect all, or virtually all, dealers.

With a stochastic time change from calendar-time to information-time, we derive a parsimonious option pricing formula with stochastic volatility as a risk-neutral Poisson sum of Merton's (1973) prices over the option's information-time maturity domain. The formula contains two unobservable parameters, information arrival intensity and information-time asset volatility, with stochastic volatility induced by random information arrival. When the information arrival rate intensifies, the option price increases and vice-versa. We test the formula in pricing, hedging, and excess profits capture empirically using currency and the S&P 500 futures options transaction data.

Despite the fact that taxable investors would prefer to defer the realization of capital gains indefinitely, most open-end mutual funds regularly realize and distribute a large portion of their gains. We present a model in which unrealized gains in the fund's portfolio increase expected future taxable distributions, and thus increase the present value of a new investor's tax liability. In equilibrium, managers interested in attracting new investors pass through taxable capital gains to reduce the overhang of unrealized gains. This model contains a number of empirical predictions that are consistent with data on actual fund overhangs.

The United States has many banks that are small relative to large corporations and play a limited role in corporate governance, and a well developed stock market with an associated market for corporate control. In contrast, Japanese and German banks are fewer in number but larger in relative size and are said to play a central governance role. Neither country has an active market for corporate control. We extend the debate on the relative efficiency of bank- and stock market-centered capital markets by developing a further systematic difference between the two systems: the greater vitality of venture capital in stock market-centered systems. Understanding the link between the stock market and the venture capital market requires understanding the contractual arrangements between entrepreneurs and venture capital providers; especially, the importance of the opportunity to enter into an implicit contract over control, which gives a successful entrepreneur the option to reacquire control from the venture capitalist by using an initial public offering as the means by which the venture capitalist exits from a portfolio investment. We also extend the literature on venture capital contracting by offering an explanation for two central characteristics of the U.S. venture capital market: relatively rapid exit by venture capital providers from investments in portfolio companies; and the common practice of exit through an initial public offering.

We examine the effects of bank M&As on small business lending using data on over 6000 recent U.S. bank M&As. We are the first to decompose the impact of M&As into the static effects from simply melding the antecedent institutions and the dynamic effects associated with post-M&A refocusing of the consolidated institution. We are also the first to estimate the dynamic reactions of other local banks. We find that the static effects of consolidation reduce small business lending, but are mostly offset by the reactions of other banks, and in some cases also by refocusing efforts of the consolidating institutions themselves.

In theory, hedging restrictions faced by managers make executive stock options more difficult to value than ordinary options, because they imply that exercise policies of managers depend on their preferences and endowments. Using data on option exercises from 40 firms, this paper shows that a simple extension of the ordinary American option model which introduces random, exogenous exercise and forfeiture predicts actual exercise times and payoffs just as well as an elaborate utility-maximizing model that explicitly accounts for the nontransferability of options. The simpler model could therefore be more useful than the preference-based model for valuing executive options in practice.