Knowledge that Transforms

Fama and French (2006) use the dividend-discount model to develop the role of expected profitability, expected investment, and the book-to-market ratio as predictors of stock returns. One reported empirical result is anomalous. The valuation model establishes that the comparative static relation between expected returns and expected investment is negative, yet it appears to be positive and insignificant. We show that the posited valuation relations apply at the firm level, and not at the per share level at which they were tested. Once the variables are measured at the firm level, all the Fama French predictions are validated.

This article constructs triple-difference tests around shifts in the supply of risk management instruments available to agricultural producers to reveal a positive relation between risk management and productivity. This relation is more robust when producers adopt instruments with payoffs linked to group performance and weaker when payoffs are linked to individual performance. Additionally, productivity is particularly high among risk-managing producers in counties containing high levels of bank deposits, a proxy for access to finance. Overall, this article illuminates the relation between hedging and real firm outcomes as well as the interaction between access to finance and firms' risk management choices.

Because the personal tax treatments of interest and dividend income likely affect the relative cost of debt and equity financing, a sharp change in tax treatment could affect firms' optimal leverage. This paper examines the effect of the 2003 equity income tax cut on firms' debt usage. Because this tax cut affected only individual investors, we can use a difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of personal tax on firms' leverage. Previous research has found that the 2003 tax cut encouraged dividend payouts and reduced the cost of equity, but it provides no link to equilibrium leverage ratios. We estimate that the tax cut causes the affected firms' leverage to decrease by about 5 percentage points. Furthermore, we show that the effects of the tax cut are stronger for firms with lower marginal corporate tax rates and for firms that are not financially constrained, consistent with our theoretical predictions. Overall, we find strong evidence that personal tax is an important determinant of firms' optimal leverage.

We study a new data set of dividend futures with maturities up to ten years across three world regions: the US, Europe, and Japan. We use these asset prices to construct equity yields, analogous to bond yields. We decompose the equity yields to obtain a term structure of expected dividend growth rates and a term structure of risk premia, which decomposes the equity risk premium by maturity. We find that the slope of the term structure of risk premia is pro-cyclical, whereas the slope of the term structure of expected dividend growth rates is counter-cyclical. The comovement of yields across regions is, on average, higher for long-maturity yields than for short-maturity yields, whereas the variation in this comovement is much higher for short-maturity yields.

We develop a dynamic model of investment, capital structure, leasing, and risk management based on firms' need to collateralize promises to pay with tangible assets. Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay subject to collateral constraints. Leasing is strongly collateralized costly financing and permits greater leverage. More constrained firms hedge less and lease more, both cross-sectionally and dynamically. Mature firms suffering adverse cash flow shocks may cut risk management and sell and lease back assets. Persistence of productivity reduces the benefits to hedging low cash flows and can lead firms not to hedge at all.

From 1990 to 2011, the share of world IPO activity by non-U.S. firms increased because of financial globalization and because of a decrease in U.S. IPO activity. Financial globalization reduces the impact of national institutions on domestic IPO activity and enables more non-U.S. firms from countries with weak institutions to go public with a global IPO. U.S. IPO activity does not benefit from financial globalization. Compared to other countries, the rate of small-firm IPO activity in the U.S. is abnormally low in the 2000s. This abnormally low rate cannot be explained by the regulatory changes of the early 2000s.

We show that pay is higher for chief executive officers (CEOs) with general managerial skills gathered during lifetime work experience. We use CEOs' résumés of Standard and Poor's 1,500 firms from 1993 through 2007 to construct an index of general skills that are transferable across firms and industries. We estimate an annual pay premium for generalist CEOs (those with an index value above the median) of 19% relative to specialist CEOs, which represents nearly a million dollars per year. This relation is robust to the inclusion of firm- and CEO-level controls, including fixed effects. CEO pay increases the most when firms externally hire a new CEO and switch from a specialist to a generalist CEO. Furthermore, the pay premium is higher when CEOs are hired to perform complex tasks such as restructurings and acquisitions. Our findings provide direct evidence of the increased importance of general managerial skills over firm-specific human capital in the market for CEOs in the last decades.