Knowledge that Transforms

We find an asset pricing anomaly whereby companies have positive abnormal returns in months when they are predicted to issue a dividend. Abnormal returns in predicted dividend months are high relative to other companies and relative to dividend-paying companies in months without a predicted dividend, making risk-based explanations unlikely. The anomaly is as large as the value premium, but less volatile. The premium is consistent with price pressure from dividend-seeking investors. Measures of liquidity and demand for dividends are associated with larger price increases in the period before the ex-day (when there is no news about the dividend) and larger reversals afterward.

Univariate dependencies in market volatility, both objective and risk neutral, are best described by long-memory fractionally integrated processes. Meanwhile, the ex post difference, or the variance swap payoff reflecting the reward for bearing volatility risk, displays far less persistent dynamics. Using intraday data for the Standard & Poor's 500 and the volatility index (VIX), coupled with frequency domain methods, we separate the series into various components. We find that the coherence between volatility and the volatility-risk reward is the strongest at long-run frequencies. Our results are consistent with generalized long-run risk models and help explain why classical efforts of establishing a naïve return-volatility relation fail. We also estimate a fractionally cointegrated vector autoregression (CFVAR). The model-implied long-run equilibrium relation between the two variance variables results in nontrivial return predictability over interdaily and monthly horizons, supporting the idea that the cointegrating relation between the two variance measures proxies for the economic uncertainty rewarded by the market.

This paper explores commonalities across asset pricing anomalies. In particular, we assess implications of financial distress for the profitability of anomaly-based trading strategies. Strategies based on price momentum, earnings momentum, credit risk, dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility, and capital investments derive their profitability from taking short positions in high credit risk firms that experience deteriorating credit conditions. In contrast, the value-based strategy derives most of its profitability from taking long positions in high credit risk firms that survive financial distress and subsequently realize high returns. The accruals anomaly is an exception. It is robust among high and low credit risk firms in all credit conditions.

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, banks should ensure that their incentive compensation policies appropriately balance long-term risk with short-term rewards. Using daily output data from mortgage officers in a US commercial bank, we test the notion that nonlinear contracts create time-varying incentives for the employees and impose costs on the firm. We provide empirical evidence that mortgage officers greatly increase their output toward the end of each month, when the minimum monthly quota is assessed. This occurs through a combination of reducing the processing time and approving some marginal applications. We also find that mortgages originated on the last working day of the month have a higher likelihood of delinquency.

Using a unique database of 381 newly privatized firms from 57 countries, we investigate the impact of shareholders' identity on corporate risk-taking behavior. We find strong and robust evidence that state (foreign) ownership is negatively (positively) related to corporate risk-taking. Moreover, we find that high risk-taking by foreign owners depends on the strength of country-level governance institutions. Our results suggest that relinquishment of government control, openness to foreign investment, and improvement of country-level governance institutions are key determining factors of corporate risk-taking in newly privatized firms.

We study the exposure of the US corporate bond returns to liquidity shocks of stocks and Treasury bonds over the period 1973–2007 in a regime-switching model. In one regime, liquidity shocks have mostly insignificant effects on bond prices, whereas in another regime, a rise in illiquidity produces significant but conflicting effects: Prices of investment-grade bonds rise while prices of speculative-grade (junk) bonds fall substantially (relative to the market). Relating the probability of these regimes to macroeconomic conditions we find that the second regime can be predicted by economic conditions that are characterized as “stress.” These effects, which are robust to controlling for other systematic risks (term and default), suggest the existence of time-varying liquidity risk of corporate bond returns conditional on episodes of flight to liquidity. Our model can predict the out-of-sample bond returns for the stress years 2008–2009. We find a similar pattern for stocks classified by high or low book-to-market ratio, where again, liquidity shocks play a special role in periods characterized by adverse economic conditions.

How do markets for debt cash flow rights, with and without accompanying control rights, affect the efficiency of lending? A bank makes a loan, learns if it needs monitoring, and then decides whether to lay off credit risk. The bank can transfer credit risk by either selling the loan or buying a credit default swap (CDS). With a CDS, the originating bank retains the loan's control rights; with loan sales, control rights pass to the loan buyer. Credit risk transfer leads to excessive monitoring of riskier credits and insufficient monitoring of safer credits. Increases in banks' cost of equity capital exacerbate these effects. For riskier credits, loan sales typically dominate CDS but not for safer credits. Once repeated lending and consequent reputation concerns are modeled, although CDSs remain dominated by loan sales for riskier credits, for safer credits they can dominate loan sales, supporting better monitoring (albeit to a limited extent) while allowing efficient risk sharing. Restrictions on the bank's ability to sell the loan expand the range in which CDSs are used and monitoring is too low.

We document empirical support for a key micro-level channel—innovation by young, private firms—through which financial sector deregulation affects economic growth. We find that intrastate banking deregulation, which increased the local market power of banks, decreased the level and risk of innovation by young, private firms. In contrast, interstate banking deregulation, which decreased the local market power of banks, increased the level and risk of innovation by young, private firms. These contrasting effects on innovation also translated into contrasting effects on economic growth. Our study suggests that the nature of financial sector deregulation crucially affects its potential benefits to the real economy.

This paper provides benchmarks for monitoring costs and evaluates the net returns to shareholder activism. I model activism as a sequential decision process consisting of demand negotiations, board representation, and proxy contest and estimate the costs of each activism stage. A campaign ending in a proxy fight has average costs of $10.71 million. I find that the estimated monitoring costs reduce activist returns by more than two-thirds. The mean net activist return is close to zero but the top quartile of activists earns higher returns on their activist holdings than on their non-activist investments. The large-sample evidence presented in this paper aids in understanding the nature and evolution of activist engagements.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence that bank regulation is associated with cross-border spillover effects through the lending activities of large multinational banks. We analyze business lending by 155 banks to 9,613 firms in 1,976 different localities across 16 countries. We find that lower barriers to entry, tighter restrictions on bank activities, and to a lesser degree higher minimum capital requirements in domestic markets are associated with lower bank lending standards abroad. The effects are stronger when banks are less efficiently supervised at home, and are observed to exist independently from the impact of host-country regulation.