Knowledge that Transforms

I analyze financing policies in a firm owned by atomistic shareholders who observe neither cash flows nor management's investment decisions. Management derives perquisites from investment and invests as much as possible. Since it always claims that cash flow is too low fund all positive net present value projects, its claim is not credible when cash flow is truly low. Consequently, management is forced to invest too little when cash flow is low and chooses to invest too much when it is high. Financing policies, by influencing the resources under management's control, can reduce the costs of over- and underinvestment.

We examine the importance of dividend-capture trading in NASDAQ stocks by testing for cross-sectional relations between ex-day abnormal returns and bid-ask spreads. Throughout, we find that ex-day returns and spreads are positively related. The relation increases across dividend-yield quintiles and is strongest in high-yield stocks. The relation does not appear in a sample of non-ex-dividend days. These findings indicate that dividend-capture trading affects the ex-day returns of at least some, particularly high-yield, NASDAQ stocks, and that dividend-capture trading is important for understanding ex-dividend-day returns.

We investigate the relation between Tobin's Q and the structure of equity ownership for a sample of 1,173 firms for 1976 and 1,093 firms for 1986. We find a significant curvilinear relation between Q and the fraction of common stock owned by corporate insiders. The curve slopes upward until insider ownership reaches approximately 40% to 50% and then slopes slightly downward. We also find a significant positive relation between Q and the fraction of shares owned by institutional investors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that corporate value is a function of the structure of equity ownership.

Previous research examining the relation between dividend yield and equity returns documents a U-shaped pattern arising from the positive CAPM-adjusted average excess return of zero-dividend firms. In contrast, this paper reports that zero-dividend firms earn negative average excess returns relative to firms of similar size. Despite the apparent conformity of these results to the predictions of after-tax asset pricing models, the negative size-adjusted excess returns cannot be drive solely by tax effects. These excess returns, which are concentrated in the initial zero-dividend years and approach - 1% per month, are attributed to possible dividend-expectation effects rather than taxes.

We explore the idea that financial distress is costly because free-rider problems and information asymmetries make it difficult for firms to renegotiate with their creditors. We present evidence that Japanese firms with financial structures in which these problems are likely to be small perform better than other firms after the onset of distress. In particular, we show that firms in industrial groups — those with close financial relationships to their banks, suppliers, and customers — invest more and sell more after the onset of distress than nongroup firms. We find similar results for nongroup firms that nevertheless have strong ties to a main bank.

To economists, agency problems present challenges that can be resolved through optimal contracting or incentive mechanisms. To politicians, agency problems represent entitlements to be allocated among favored constituencies. Corporate management constitutes a powerful constituency independent of the interests of workers, local communities, and other corporate stakeholders. The political process has, for politically rational but economically dabatable reasons, systematically subordinated investors' desire to resolve agency problems to managers' desire to be protected from capital-market discipline. Politically explicit modes of analysis thus complement traditional tools of finance theory and improve our ability to explain capital-market structure and behavior.

The paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large-block transactions, and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects. We find that prices adjust within at most three trades, with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade. The temporary price effect for seller-initiated transactions is related to block size, but the temporary price effect observed for buyer-initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades. Most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size, regardless of the initiating party.

This paper investigates the effect of California's Proposition 103 on the market value of publicly traded property- and liability-insurance companies. The passage of this referendum on November 8, 1988 moved California from a market-oriented to a heavily regulated insurance-pricing system. During the period surrounding the election, the average stock price of insurance companies doing business in California declined by 6.91%. The decline is positively related to the proportion of a firm's premiums affected by the referendum and the proportion generated in other states where insurance regulation is likely to change, and negatively related to the firm's profitability.

Law and politics affect the financial structure of the public corporation, perhaps as much as economics. Law restricts financial institutions from holding large equity blocks and from networking the small blocks they do own. Impetus for these restrictions came from several sources: a public-spirited belief that financial stability would be fostered by financial fragmentation, American federalism (each state created its own insular set of financial institutions), rivalries between groups of financial institutions, and popular mistrust of powerful private financial institutions. The stability of many of these rules also derives from the political resistance that one would expect corporate managers and benefited financial institutions to offer to any change.

Venture-capital organizations raise money from individuals and institutions for investment in early-stage businesses that offer high potential but high risk. This paper describes and analyzes the structure of venture-capital organizations, focusing on the relationship between investors and venture capitalists and between venture-capital firms and the ventures in which they invest. The agency problems in these organizations and to the contracts and operating procedures that have evolved in response are emphasized. Venture-capital organizations are contrasted with large, publicly traded corporations and with leveraged buyout organizations.