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The cost of market versus regulatory discipline in banking
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.
Capital budgeting and delegation1We thank Bhagwan Chowdhry, Yaniv Grinstein, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at Columbia, Duke, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Indiana, Tel Aviv, Vanderbilt, and the European Finance Association Meetings (Vienna, 1997).1
As part of our ongoing research into capital budgeting processes as responses to decentralized information and incentive problems, we focus in this paper on when a level of a managerial hierarchy will delegate the allocation of capital across projects and time to the level below it. In our model, delegation is a way to save on costly investigation of proposed projects. Therefore, it is more extensive the larger are the costs of such investigations. This delegation takes advantage of the fact that the lower-level manager's preferences are assumed to be similar (though not identical) to those of the higher level.
Alternative factor specifications, security characteristics, and the cross-section of expected stock returns1We are especially grateful to Eugene Fama (a referee), an anonymous referee and Bill Schwert (the editor) for insightful and constructive suggestions. We also thank Wayne Ferson, Ken French, Will Goetzmann, Craig Holden, Ravi Jagannathan, Bob Jennings, Bruce Lehmann, Josef Lakonishok, Richard Roll, participants at the 1997 Meetings of the Western Finance Association, the 1997 UCLA/USC/UC Irvine conference, the November 1997 Asset Pricing Meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Atlanta Forum, and seminars at Columbia, Indiana, Florida, New York, Tulane, and Yale Universities; Eugene Fama and Ken French for providing part of the data used in this study; and Christoph Schenzler for excellent programming assistance. The second author acknowledges support from the Dean's Fund for Research and the Financial Markets Research Center at Vanderbilt University. We are responsible for remaining errors. This paper was formerly titled `A Re-Examination of Security Return Anomalies'.1
We examine the relation between stock returns, measures of risk, and several non-risk security characteristics, including the book-to-market ratio, firm size, the stock price, the dividend yield, and lagged returns. Our primary objective is to determine whether non-risk characteristics have marginal explanatory power relative to the arbitrage pricing theory benchmark, with factors determined using, in turn, the Connor and Korajczyk (CK; 1988) and the Fama and French (FF; 1993b) approaches. Fama–MacBeth-type regressions using risk adjusted returns provide evidence of return momentum, size, and book-to-market effects, together with a significant and negative relation between returns and trading volume, even after accounting for the CK factors. When the analysis is repeated using the FF factors, we find that the size and book-to-market effects are attenuated, while the momentum and trading volume effects persist. In addition, Nasdaq stocks show significant underperformance after adjusting for risk using either method.
The relation between implied and realized volatility
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.
The effect of changes in ownership structure on performance: Evidence from the thrift industry1We thank George Aragon, Ben Branch, Benjamin Esty (the referee), Mark Flannery, Alvin Harrell, Clifford G. Holderness, Edith Hotchkiss, Michael Jensen, Edward J. Kane, Donald May, Marcia Millon Cornett, Manju Puri, G. William Schwert (the editor), Henri Servaes, Robert Taggert, Hassan Tehranian, Thomas Vartanian, William Wilhelm, Julie Williams, and seminar participants at Boston University, the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC, Suffolk University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Columbia University for helpful discussion of this study. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1995 Annual Meetings of both the Western Finance Association and the Financial Management Association, and at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association.1
Restrictions on stock ownership may harm a company's performance, because restrictions prevent owners from choosing an optimal structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure of a sample of thrift institutions that converted from mutual to stock ownership. We find that after conversion and the expiration of ownership-structure restrictions, firm performance improves significantly, and the portions of the firm owned by managers and the firm's employee stock ownership plan increase. Changes in performance are positively associated with changes in ownership by managers, but negatively associated with changes in ownership by employee stock ownership plans.
Short-term traders and liquidity:
The abolition and reinstatement of the forward trading facility (Badla) on the Bombay Stock Exchange is used to study the effect of short-term traders on share prices and liquidity. The reactions of stock prices to the ban reveal an average negative abnormal return of 15% on Badla stocks as compared to the non-Badla stocks. The ensuing period shows a significant decline in the liquidity of the Badla Stocks related to the announcement period CARs. Our results suggest that the market perceives short-term traders as playing a significant positive role, with a larger benefit accruing to the relatively less-liquid stocks.
Ex dividend day stock price behavior: discreteness or tax-induced clienteles?
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.
Does order preferencing matter?
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.
Information-time option pricing: theory and empirical evidence1We would like to thank Robert Merton, Peter Ritchken, L. Sankarasubramanian, David Shimko, and Mark Weinstein for useful discussions. We are indebted to John B. Long, Jr. (the editor) and Robert Whaley (the referee) for detailed and constructive comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.1
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.