Knowledge that Transforms

To control risk-related incentive problems, equity holders are expected to manage both the convexity and slope of the relation between firm performance and managers’ wealth. I find stock options, but not common stockholdings, significantly increase the sensitivity of CEOs’ wealth to equity risk. Cross-sectionally, this sensitivity is positively related to firms’ investment opportunities. This result is consistent with managers receiving incentives to invest in risky projects when the potential loss from underinvestment in valuable risk-increasing projects is greatest. Firms’ stock-return volatility is positively related to the convexity provided to managers, suggesting convex incentive schemes influence investing and financing decisions.

Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the firm's contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985), (Journal of Political Economy, 93, 1155–1177) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key variables in the contracting environment in ways consistent with the predictions of principal-agent models. A large fraction of the cross-sectional variation in managerial ownership is explained by unobserved firm heterogeneity. Moreover, after controlling both for observed firm characteristics and firm fixed effects, we cannot conclude (econometrically) that changes in managerial ownership affect firm performance.

We examine whether an adverse event at one bank generates externalities for the banking industry, and assess whether the population of commercial banks is homogeneous. We find dividend reductions are negative events for both announcing money center and regional banks, but only reductions at money center banks have negative, contagion-type externalities. Dividend reductions at regional banks have positive competitive effects on geographic rivals. Regulatory enforcement actions induce negative valuation effects that are idiosyncratic to targeted banks, but actions against regional banks generate positive competitive effects on geographic rivals. Our evidence suggests that regional banking markets are not contestable.

This paper studies generalized method of moments tests for the stochastic discount factor representation of asset pricing models when one of the proposed factors is in fact useless, defined as being independent of the asset returns. Analytic results on asymptotic distributions and simulation results on finite sample distributions both show that (i)the Wald test tends to overreject the hypothesis of a zero factor premium for a useless factor when the model is misspecified, (ii)with the presence of a useless factor, the power of the over-identifying restriction test in rejecting misspecified models is reduced, and in some cases a misspecified model with a useless factor is more likely to be accepted than the true model.

This paper provides evidence on a previously unidentified source of managerial incentives: concerns about post-retirement board service. Both the likelihood that a retired CEO serves on his own board two years after departure, as well as the likelihood of serving as an outside director on other boards, are positively and strongly related to his performance while CEO. Retention on the CEO's own board depends primarily on stock returns, while service on outside boards is better explained by accounting returns. The evidence also suggests that firms consider ability in choosing board members.

We document substantial long-run post-issue underperformance by firms making straight and convertible debt offerings from 1975 to 1989. This long-run underperformance is more severe for smaller, younger, and NASDAQ-listed firms, and for firms issuing speculative grade debt. We also find strong evidence that the underperformance of issuers of both straight and convertible debt is limited to those issues that occur in periods with a high volume of issues. In contrast to earlier event studies that found insignificantly negative abnormal returns at the time of debt issue announcements and concluded that debt offerings had no impact on shareholder wealth, our results suggest that debt offerings, like equity offerings, are signals that the firm is overvalued. As with equity offerings and repurchases, the market appears to underreact at the time of the debt offering announcement so that the full impact of the offering is only realized over a longer time horizon.

We examine the determinants and implications of holdings of cash and marketable securities by publicly traded U.S. firms in the 1971–1994 period. In time-series and cross-section tests, we find evidence supportive of a static tradeoff model of cash holdings. In particular, firms with strong growth opportunities and riskier cash flows hold relatively high ratios of cash to total non-cash assets. Firms that have the greatest access to the capital markets, such as large firms and those with high credit ratings, tend to hold lower ratios of cash to total non-cash assets. At the same time, however, we find evidence that firms that do well tend to accumulate more cash than predicted by the static tradeoff model where managers maximize shareholder wealth. There is little evidence that excess cash has a large short-run impact on capital expenditures, acquisition spending, and payouts to shareholders. The main reason that firms experience large changes in excess cash is the occurrence of operating losses.

This paper examines the time-series relations among expected return, risk, and book-to-market (B/M) at the portfolio level. I find that B/M predicts economically and statistically significant time-variation in expected stock returns. Further, B/M is strongly associated with changes in risk, as measured by the Fama and French (1993) (Journal of Financial Economics, 33, 3–56) three-factor model. After controlling for risk, B/M provides no incremental information about expected returns. The evidence suggests that the three-factor model explains time-varying expected returns better than a characteristics-based model.

Many Japanese firms reduced dependence on banks following financial deregulation in the 1980s. The financial architecture of Japanese firms after liberalization provides an opportunity to investigate the choice of financing with public bonds versus monitored bank loans. Examination of accounting and stock price data for a sample of Japanese firms in the late 1980s suggests that debt structure is related to variables that serve as proxies for agency costs of debt. In particular, we find that the proportion of bond debt is inversely related to growth opportunities, while the proportion of bank debt is positively related to growth opportunities.

Most derivative securities must be priced by numerical techniques. These models contain “distribution error” and “nonlinearity error”. The Adaptive Mesh Model (AMM) sharply reduces nonlinearity error by grafting one or more small sections of fine high-resolution lattice onto a tree with coarser time and price steps. Three different AMM structures are presented, one for pricing ordinary options, one for barrier options, and one for computing delta and gamma efficiently. The AMM approach can be adapted to a wide variety of contingent claims. For some common problems, accuracy increases by several orders of magnitude with no increase in execution time.