Knowledge that Transforms

This paper analyzes the determinants of the cross-sectional variation of the average volatility risk premia for a representative set of portfolios sorted by volatility risk premium beta. The market volatility risk premium and, especially, the default premium are shown to be key risk factors in the cross-sectional variation of average volatility risk premium payoffs. The cross-sectional variation of risk premia seems to reflect a very different behavior of the underlying components of our sample portfolios with respect to credit or financial stress that generates a significant dispersion of the volatility swap pricing of these securities.

We examine returns, order flow, and market conditions in the minutes before, during, and after NYSE and Nasdaq short sales. We find two distinct types of short sales: those that provide liquidity, and those that demand it. Liquidity-supplying shorts are strongly contrarian at intraday horizons. They trade when spreads are unusually wide, facing greater adverse selection. Liquidity-demanding shorts trade when spreads are narrow and tend to follow short-term price declines. These results support a competitive rational expectations model where both market-makers and informed traders short, indicating that these two shorting types are integral to both price discovery and liquidity provision.

Passive institutional investors are an increasingly important component of U.S. stock ownership. To examine whether and by which mechanisms passive investors influence firms' governance, we exploit variation in ownership by passive mutual funds associated with stock assignments to the Russell 1000 and 2000 indexes. Our findings suggest that passive mutual funds influence firms' governance choices, resulting in more independent directors, removal of takeover defenses, and more equal voting rights. Passive investors appear to exert influence through their large voting blocs, and consistent with the observed governance differences increasing firm value, passive ownership is associated with improvements in firms’ longer-term performance.

We put forward a model in which analysts are uncertain about a firm’s earnings process. Faced with the possibility of using a misspecified model, analysts issue forecasts that are robust to model misspecification. We estimate that this mechanism explains approximately 60% of the autocorrelation in analysts’ forecast errors. The remainder stems from the cross-sectional variation in mean forecast errors and in analysts’ estimation errors of the persistence of earnings growth shocks. Consistent with our model, we find that analysts learn about some features of the earnings process but not others, and this learning reduces, but does not eliminate, the autocorrelation of forecast errors as firms age. Other potential explanations for the autocorrelation of analyst forecast errors are rejected. Our model of robust forecasting applies not only to analysts’ forecasts but also to all model-based forecasts.

We use firm and chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics motivated by optimal contracting theory to estimate optimal CEO relative debt-equity incentive ratios. Equity values rise as firms adjust CEO incentive ratios toward their predicted optimums, whether that increases or decreases the relative incentive ratio. Debt values rise as firms adjust ratios upward and do not fall as they adjust them downward. Our predicted optimums explain changes in equity and debt values better than a model in which firms simply match CEO inside debt-equity ratios to firm debt-equity ratios. The results suggest important cross-sectional differences in firms’ optimal inside debt policies.

I study whether risk premiums for exposure to state variables in the cross-section of individual stocks are consistent with how these variables forecast macroeconomic activity in the time series. I find such time series and cross-sectional consistency. This finding suggests that investors are ultimately concerned about business cycle risk and therefore require a premium for exposure to variables that contain systematic economic news. This finding challenges recent portfolio-level evidence showing that state variable risk premiums are inconsistent with hedging incentives in the Intertemporal CAPM. Moreover, state variable risk premiums are not fully captured by the factors and characteristics of Fama and French (1992, 1993).

Shareholder participation in valuable domestic rights offerings averages only 64%, which is considerably lower than previously asserted. This causes wealth transfers from nonparticipating to participating shareholders that average 7% of the offering. Wealth transfers are larger in nontransferable and bigger offerings. The stock market reacts more negatively to larger wealth transfers. Offerings with lower shareholder participation also fall short in raising publicly stated capital goals. Rights offerings are far more common in countries with institutional practices that limit nonparticipating shareholders’ wealth losses. These findings suggest that agency conflicts influence the use of rights offers.

A classic result by Merton (1973) is that, except just before expiration or dividend payments, one should never exercise a call option and never convert a convertible bond. We show theoretically that this result is overturned when investors face frictions. Early option exercise can be optimal when it reduces short-sale costs, transaction costs, or funding costs. We provide consistent empirical evidence, documenting billions of dollars of early exercise for options and convertible bonds using unique data on actual exercise decisions and frictions. Our model can explain as much as 98% of early exercises by market makers and 67% by customers.

We investigate how individual equity prices respond to continuous and jumpy market price moves and how these different market price risks, or betas, are priced in the cross section of expected stock returns. Based on a novel high-frequency data set of almost 1,000 stocks over two decades, we find that the two rough betas associated with intraday discontinuous and overnight returns entail significant risk premiums, while the intraday continuous beta does not. These higher risk premiums for the discontinuous and overnight market betas remain significant after controlling for a long list of other firm characteristics and explanatory variables.

This paper examines the hypothesis that hedge fund managers gain an informational advantage in securities trading through their connections with lobbyists. Using data sets on the long-equity holdings and lobbyist connections of hedge funds from 1999 through 2012, we show that hedge funds outperform passive benchmarks by 56–93 basis points per month on their political holdings when they are connected to lobbyists. Furthermore, the political outperformance of connected funds decreased significantly after the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act became effective. Our study provides evidence on the transmission of political information in financial markets and on the value of such information to financial market participants.