Knowledge that Transforms

We operationalize a firm's competitive strategy through a new empirical measure, and develop a framework for empirical analysis of the market value of strategic behavior. Using this framework, we study announcement effects of R&D spending. The announcing firm's stock prices are positively influenced by a change in spending, and negatively by our competitive strategy measure (CSM). Competitors' stock prices are positively influenced by the interaction between the market's reaction to the announcing firm and the CSM. Our results are consistent with positive effects of ‘accommodating’ competition with strategic substitutes, and nonpositive effects of ‘tough’ competition with strategic complements.

I examine the effect of prudent-man laws on the behavior of institutional investors. Variation in exposure to legal liability across types of investment managers allows me to disentangle the effect of the prudent-man laws from other potential influences on manager behavior. Bank managers significantly tilt the composition of their portfolios toward stocks that are viewed by the courts as prudent, while mutual fund managers choose not. I show that differences in the direction that bank and mutual fund managers choose to tilt may explain their portfolio performance differences over time.

The tax, employee benefit, capital structure, and corporate control effects of ESOPs are examined by estimating the stock market reaction to ESOP announcements. This is the first empirical examination of the relationship between computed firm-specific tax savings and firm value, and therefore provides evidence that helps resolve the theoretical dispute over ESOP tax savings. The results show that investors expect ESOPs to increase cash flows through tax savings, and to reduce the likelihood of takeover for companies subject to takeover attempts when ESOPs are announced.

This paper examines the behavior of institutional traders. We use unique data on the equity transactions of 21 institutions of differing investment styles which provide a detailed account of the anatomy of the trading process. The data include information on the number of days needed to fill an order and types of order placement strategies employed. We analyze the motivations for trade, the determinants of trade duration, and the choice of order type. The analysis provides some support for the predictions made by theoretical models, but suggests that these models fail to capture important dimensions of trading behavior.

We document that firms making seasoned equity offerings during 1975–1989 substantially underperformed a sample of matched firms from the same industry and of similar size that did not issue equity. This underperformance persists even after controlling for trading system, offer size, and the issuing firm's age and book-to-market ratio. It is similar to that previously documented for initial public offerings, suggesting that managers take advantage of overvaluation in both the initial and seasoned equity offering markets.

Greater corporate focus is consistent with shareholder wealth maximization. Diseconomies of scope in the 1980s are confirmed by a trend towards focus or specialization, a positive relation between stock returns and focus increases, and the failure of diversified firms to exploit financial economies of scope (coinsurance of debt or reliance on internal capital markets). Large focused firms were less likely to be subject to hostile takeover attempts than were other firms, but diversified firms were distinguished in the 1980s mostly by being relatively active participants, as both buyers and sellers, in the market for corporate control.

We estimate diversification's effect on firm value by imputing stand-alone values for individual business segments. Comparing the sum of these stand-alone values to the firm's actual value implies a 13% to 15% average value loss from diversification during 1986–1991. The value loss is smaller when the segments of the diversified firm are in the same two-digit SIC code. We find that overinvestment and cross-subsidization contribute to the value loss. The loss is reduced modestly by tax benefits of diversification.

This paper examines whether information across international markets is rationally incorporated into stock prices. We find that Japanese Nikkei index-based futures traded in the U.S. provide complete information about contemporaneous overnight Japanese returns. Moreover, existing cross-dependence between the U.S. and Japanese stock index returns is subsumed by the information content of the derivative securities. Our findings cast doubt on trading models based on irrational traders who either overreact or only partially adjust to movements in foreign stock markets.

This paper provides large-sample evidence that poison pill rights issues, control share laws, and business combination laws have not systematically deterred takeovers and are unlikely to have caused the demise of the 1980s market for corporate control, even though 87% of all exchange-listed firms are now covered by one of these antitakeover measures. We show that poison pills and control share laws are reliably associated with higher takeover premiums for selling shareholders, both unconditionally and conditional on a successful takeover, and we provide updated event study evidence for the three-quarters of all poison pills not yet analyzed. Antitakeover measures increase the bargaining position of target firms, but they do not prevent many transactions.

This paper investigates the relation between the number of analysts following a security and the estimated adverse selection cost of transacting in the security, controlling for the effects of previously identified determinants of liquidity. Using intraday data for the year 1988, we find that greater analyst following tends to reduce adverse selection costs based on the Kyle (1985) notion of market depth. This result is consistent with the analysis of Admati and Pfleiderer (1988). Estimates of structural parameters of a version of the Admati and Pfleiderer model of endogenous information acquisition provide qualified support for the model.