Knowledge that Transforms

This study examines the role of political connections in firms’ financing strategies and their long-run performance. We view political connections as an example for domestic arrangements which can reduce the benefits of global financing. Using data from Indonesia, we find that firms with strong political connections are less likely to have publicly traded foreign securities. As a result, estimates of the performance consequences of foreign financing are severely biased if value-creating domestic arrangements such as political relationships are ignored. Connections not only alter firms’ financing strategies, they also influence long-run performance. Tracking returns across several regimes, we show that firms have difficulty re-establishing connections with a new government when their patron falls from power, leading closely connected firms to underperform under the new regime and subsequently to increase their foreign financing.

I use Easley and O’Hara's [1992, Journal of Finance 47, 577–604] private information-based trading variable, PIN, together with a comprehensive public news database to empirically measure the effect of private and public information on the post-announcement drift. I show that stocks associated with high PIN, consensus public news surprises, and low media coverage experience low or insignificant drift. Thus not all information acquisition variables have the same effect on the market's efficiency. Whether information is public or private is irrelevant; what matters is whether information is associated with the arrival rate of informed or uninformed traders.

This paper uses a sample of large trades executed on the London Stock Exchange's SEAQ-I market for European cross-traded firms to investigate their impact on home market prices when parallel markets suffer from information frictions. I find that (a) large London trades produce price impacts in home markets even though no timely information is published, (b) market makers appear to pre- and post-position their inventories by splitting orders across markets, and (c) the price discovery process across markets changes significantly around large trades with the foreign market making a significantly bigger contribution to price discovery at this time, even though information opaqueness exists.

This paper analyzes the links between corporate tax avoidance and the growth of high-powered incentives for managers. A simple model demonstrates the role of feedback effects between tax sheltering and managerial diversion in determining how high-powered incentives influence tax sheltering decisions. A novel measure of corporate tax avoidance (the component of the book-tax gap not attributable to accounting accruals) allows for an investigation of the link between tax avoidance and incentive compensation. Increases in incentive compensation tend to reduce the level of tax sheltering, in a manner consistent with a complementary relationship between diversion and sheltering. In addition, this negative effect is driven primarily by firms with relatively weak governance arrangements, confirming a central prediction of the model. These results can help explain the growing cross-sectional variation among firms in their levels of tax avoidance, the undersheltering puzzle, and why large book-tax gaps are associated with subsequent negative abnormal returns.

This paper provides evidence that financial development has a large causal effect in the reduction of macroeconomic volatility resulting from the role of the financial system in liquidity provision. In particular, financial system development leads to a comparatively larger reduction in the volatility of output in sectors with high liquidity needs. Most of this decline results from the stabilization of the output of existing firms, although the volatility of the number of firms also drops significantly. Among different aspects of the financial system, the depth of financial intermediaries plays the main role in the reduction of volatility.

Abtract We provide evidence that the use of discretionary accruals to manipulate reported earnings is more pronounced at firms where the CEO's potential total compensation is more closely tied to the value of stock and option holdings. In addition, during years of high accruals, CEOs exercise unusually large numbers of options and CEOs and other insiders sell large quantities of shares.

This paper examines the relation between the stock price synchronicity and analyst activity in emerging markets. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that security analysts specialize in the production of firm-specific information, we find that securities which are covered by more analysts incorporate greater (lesser) market-wide (firm-specific) information. Using the R2 statistics of the market model as a measure of synchronicity of stock price movement, we find that greater analyst coverage increases stock price synchronicity. Furthermore, after controlling for the influence of firm size on the lead–lag relation, we find that the returns of high analyst-following portfolio lead returns of low analyst-following portfolio more than vice versa. We also find that the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts in a high analyst-following portfolio affects the aggregate returns of the portfolio itself as well as those of the low analyst-following portfolio, whereas the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts of the low analyst-following portfolio have no predictive ability. Finally, when the forecast dispersion is high, the effect of analyst coverage on stock price synchronicity is reduced.

Leverage raises stock volatility, driving a wedge between the cost of debt to shareholders and the cost to undiversified, risk-averse managers. I quantify these “volatility costs” of debt and examine their impact on financing decisions. I find that: (1) the volatility costs of debt can be large for executives exposed to firm-specific risk; (2) for a range of empirically relevant parameters, higher option ownership tends to increase, not decrease, the volatility costs of debt; and (3) for managers with stock options, a stock price increase typically raises volatility costs. For a large sample of US firms, I find evidence that volatility costs affect both the level of and short-term changes in debt, and that volatility costs help explain a firm's choice between debt and equity.

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of institutional share dumping surrounding control events. Institutional investors sometimes dump shares, despite trading losses, in order to manipulate share prices and trigger activism by “relationship” investors. These institutional investors are motivated to trade not only by trading profits but also by a desire to protect the value of their inventory and to disguise the quality of their own information. Relationship investor profit from targeting firms both by improving firm performance and by generating private information.

Principal-agent theory suggests that a manager should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effect of market or sector performance on the firm's own performance. Recently, it has been argued that such indexation is not observed in the data because executives can set pay in their own interests; that is, they can enjoy “pay for luck” as well as “pay for performance.” We first show that this argument is incomplete. The positive expected return on stock markets reflects compensation for bearing systematic risk. If executives’ pay is tied to market movements, they can only expect to receive the market-determined return for risk-bearing. This argument, however, assumes that executive pay is tied to bad luck as well as to good luck. If executives can truly influence the setting of their pay, they will seek to have their performance benchmarked only when it is in their interest, namely, when the benchmark has fallen. Using industry benchmarks, we find significantly less pay for luck when luck is down (in which case, pay for luck would reduce compensation) than when it is up. These empirical results are robust to a variety of alternative hypotheses and robustness checks, and they suggest that the average executive loses 25–45% less pay from bad luck than is gained from good luck.