Knowledge that Transforms

The offering prices of 64 issues of a popular retail structured equity product were, on average, almost 8% greater than estimates of the products' fair market values obtained using option pricing methods. Under reasonable assumptions about the underlying stocks' expected returns, the mean expected return estimate on the structured products is slightly below zero. The products do not provide tax, liquidity, or other benefits, and it is difficult to rationalize their purchase by informed rational investors. Our findings are, however, consistent with the recent hypothesis that issuing firms might shroud some aspects of innovative securities or introduce complexity to exploit uninformed investors.

We empirically evaluate the predictions of the mispricing hypothesis with limits-to-arbitrage suggested by Shleifer and Vishny (1997) and the q-theory with investment frictions proposed by Li and Zhang (2010) on the negative relation between asset growth and average stock returns. We conduct cross-sectional regressions of returns on asset growth on subsamples split by a given measure of limits-to-arbitrage or investment frictions. We show that: (i) proxies for limits-to-arbitrage and proxies for investment frictions are often highly correlated; (ii) the evidence based on equal-weighted returns shows significant support for both hypotheses, while the evidence from value-weighted returns is weaker; and (iii) in direct comparisons, each hypothesis is supported by a fair and similar amount of evidence.

This paper proposes a general equilibrium model that explains the pricing of the S&P 500 index options. The central ingredients are a peso component in the consumption growth rate and the time-varying risk aversion induced by habit formation which amplifies consumption shocks. The amplifying effect generates the excess volatility and a large jump-risk premium which combine to produce a pronounced volatility smirk for index options. The time-varying volatility and jump-risk premiums explain the observed state-dependent smirk patterns. Besides volatility smirks, the model has a variety of other implications which are broadly consistent with the aggregate stock and option market data.

The credit rating industry has historically been dominated by just two agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, leading to long-standing legislative and regulatory calls for increased competition. The material entry of a third rating agency (Fitch) to the competitive landscape offers a unique experiment to empirically examine how increased competition affects the credit ratings market. What we find is relatively troubling. Specifically, we discover that increased competition from Fitch coincides with lower quality ratings from the incumbents: Rating levels went up, the correlation between ratings and market-implied yields fell, and the ability of ratings to predict default deteriorated. We offer several possible explanations for these findings that are linked to existing theories.

Does corporate governance affect the timing of large investment projects? Hazard model estimates suggest strong shareholder governance may deter managers from pursuing large investments. Controlling for investment opportunities, firms with good governance experience longer spells between large investments. However, in the presence of financial constraints or strong CEO incentives (high delta (δ)), we find no such timing differences. Finally, these higher investment hazard firms exhibit significantly negative long-run operating and stock performance. Overall, our findings are consistent with the notion that poor governance associates with overinvestment.

We investigate the leverage of hedge funds in the time series and cross-section. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early 2009 when the market leverage of investment banks is highest. Changes in hedge fund leverage tend to be more predictable by economy-wide factors than by fund-specific characteristics. In particular, decreases in funding costs and increases in market values both forecast increases in hedge fund leverage. Decreases in fund return volatilities predict future increases in leverage.

We hypothesize that age similarity among small shareholders acts as an implicit coordinating device for their actions and, thus, could represent an indirect source of corporate governance in firms with dispersed ownership. We test this hypothesis on a sample of Swedish firms during the 1995–2000 period. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that compared with shareholders of differing ages, same-age noncontrolling shareholders sell more aggressively following negative firm news; firms with more age-similar small shareholders are more profitable and command higher valuation; and an increase (decline) in a firm's small shareholder age similarity brings a significantly large increase (decline) in its stock price. The last effects are more pronounced in the absence of a controlling shareholder.

This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment styles. While we also allow for predictability in fund risk loadings and benchmark returns, the major source of investment profitability is predictability in managerial skills. In particular, long-only strategies that incorporate predictability in managerial skills outperform their Fung and Hsieh (2004) benchmarks by over 17% per year. The economic value of predictability obtains for different rebalancing horizons and alternative benchmark models. It is also robust to adjustments for backfill bias, incubation bias, illiquidity, fund termination, and style composition.

We examine firms' incentives to go public in the presence of product market competition. As a result of their greater ability to diversify idiosyncratic risk in the capital market, public firms' owners tolerate higher profit variability than owners of private firms. Consequently, public firms adopt riskier and more aggressive output market strategies than private firms, which improves the competitive position of the former vis-à-vis the latter. This strategic benefit of being public, and thus, the proportion of public firms in an industry, is shown to be positively related to the degree of competitive interaction among firms in the output market, to demand uncertainty, and to the idiosyncratic portion of this uncertainty. Additional empirical predictions concern the effect of a firm's initial public offering on its market share and on its rivals' valuations. We test the model's predictions and find empirical support for most of them.

We examine how fragmentation is affecting market quality in US equity markets. We use newly available trade reporting facilities (TRFs) data to measure fragmentation, and we use a variety of empirical approaches to compare execution quality and efficiency of stocks with more and less fragmented trading. We find that fragmentation affects all stocks; more fragmented stocks have lower transactions costs and faster execution speeds; and fragmentation is associated with higher short-term volatility but greater market efficiency, in that prices are closer to being a random walk. Our results that fragmentation does not appear to harm market quality are consistent with US markets being a single virtual market with multiple points of entry.