Knowledge that Transforms

We find that ownership by different types of institutional investors has varying implications for future firm misvaluation and governance characteristics. Dedicated institutional investors decrease future firm misvaluation, in both direction and magnitude, relative to fundamentals. In contrast, transient institutional investors have the opposite effect. Using the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Regulation FD as an exogenous shock to information dissemination, we find evidence consistent with dedicated institutions having an information advantage. Similarly, dedicated investors are associated with better future governance characteristics, while transient investors are not. The valuation effects are primarily driven by institutional portfolio concentration while the governance effects are driven by portfolio turnover. These results imply a more nuanced relationship between institutional ownership and firm value and corporate governance.

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities—the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)—that provided liquidity against a range of assets during 2008–2009. Dealers with lower equity returns and greater leverage prior to borrowing from the facilities were more likely to participate in the programs, borrow more, and, in the case of the TSLF, at higher bidding rates. Dealers with less liquid collateral on their balance sheets before the facilities were introduced also tended to borrow more. The results suggest that both financial performance and balance sheet liquidity play a role in LOLR utilization.

We study how information disclosure affects the cost of equity capital and investor welfare in a dynamic setting. We show that a firm’s cost of capital decreases (increases) in the precision of public disclosure if the firm’s growth rate is below (above) a certain threshold. The threshold growth rate is higher when the firm’s cash flows are more persistent, or when other firms in the economy are growing at low rates. While current shareholders always prefer maximum public disclosure, future shareholders’ welfare decreases (increases) in the precision of public disclosure if the firm’s growth rate is below (above) the threshold.

We advocate the use of excess returns rather than yields or log prices in analysing the risk neutral dynamics of the term structure. We show that under standard assumptions, excess returns are affine in the risk neutral innovations in the factors. This framework has several important advantages. First, it allows for an easy estimation of models that are more flexible than the AR(1). Indeed, we estimate models with more general dynamics, like ARFIMA(p, d, q), almost as easily as AR(1). Second, within our framework the dimension of the unrestricted model is the same for the AR(1) as it is for the richer models, and does not expand in line with the state vector as it does in a yield or log price framework. This makes it appropriate to test all of these risk neutral dynamic specifications against the same OLS unrestricted alternative. Our results for the US Treasury bond market show that the unrestricted model is preferred to the AR(1) by the Bayesian Information Criterion, but the opposite conclusion is reached for more flexible models. A final advantage of the excess returns framework is that the pricing errors are much lower than for the equivalent log price system.

This paper shows that real decisions depend not only on the total amount of information in prices, but the source of this information—a manager learns from prices when they contain information not possessed by him. We use the staggered enforcement of insider trading laws across 27 countries as a shock to the source of information that leaves total information unchanged: enforcement reduces (increases) managers’ (outsiders’) contribution to the stock price. Consistent with the predictions of our theoretical model, enforcement increases investment-q sensitivity, even when controlling for total price informativeness. The effect is larger in industries where learning is likely to be stronger, and in emerging countries where outsider information acquisition rises most post-enforcement. Enforcement does not increase the sensitivity of investment to cash flow, a non-price measure of investment opportunities. These findings suggest that extant measures of price efficiency should be rethought when evaluating real efficiency. More broadly, our paper provides causal evidence that managers learn from prices, by using a shock to price informativeness.

The neoclassical theory of investment has mainly been tested with physical investment, but we show that it also helps explain intangible investment. At the firm level, Tobin’s q explains physical and intangible investment roughly equally well, and it explains total investment even better. Compared with physical capital, intangible capital adjusts more slowly to changes in investment opportunities. The classic q theory performs better in firms and years with more intangible capital: Total and even physical investment are better explained by Tobin’s q and are less sensitive to cash flow. At the macro level, Tobin’s q explains intangible investment many times better than physical investment. We propose a simple, new Tobin’s q proxy that accounts for intangible capital, and we show that it is a superior proxy for both physical and intangible investment opportunities.

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries—Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve—possess significant explanatory power for cross-sectional variation in expected returns. This is true not only for commonly studied equity and government bond market portfolios, but also for other more sophisticated asset classes such as corporate and sovereign bonds, derivatives, commodities, and currencies. Our intermediary capital risk factor is strongly procyclical, implying countercyclical intermediary leverage. The price of risk for intermediary capital shocks is consistently positive and of similar magnitude when estimated separately for individual asset classes, suggesting that financial intermediaries are marginal investors in many markets and hence key to understanding asset prices.

We develop a model to illustrate that equity-based compensation for non-executive employees and product market decisions are related. When the product market is competitive and employees have low bargaining power , the unique equilibrium is for each firm’s owners to offer equity-based compensation to their employees. In this setting, equity-based compensation leads to a lower wage rate, which makes each firm more competitive with its rival. However, this unique equilibrium is a Prisoner’s Dilemma for the firms’ original owners. Our results are consistent with several empirical regularities and provide predictions on when firms will offer equity-based compensation to their employees.

We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including ∼50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (“within quarter”) and the period between the quarter-end and the earnings announcement date (“post quarter”). Our within-quarter measure is powerful in explaining quarterly sales growth, revenue surprises, and earnings surprises, generating average excess announcement returns of 3.4%. However, our post-quarter measure is related negatively to announcement returns and positively to post-announcement returns. When post-quarter private information is positive, managers, at announcement, provide pessimistic guidance and use negative language. This effect is more pronounced when, post-announcement, management insiders trade. We conclude that managers do not fully disclose their private information and instead bias their disclosures down when in possession of positive private information. The data suggest that they could be motivated in part by subsequent personal stock-trading opportunities.

The majority of lower socioeconomic status (SES) households in the U.S. and Europe do not have stock investments, which is detrimental to wealth accumulation. Here, we examine one explanation for this puzzling fact, namely, that economic adversity may influence how people learn from financial information. Using experimental and survey data from the U.S. and Romania, we find that lower SES individuals form more pessimistic beliefs about the distribution of stock returns and are less likely to invest in stocks when these investments are likely to have good outcomes. SES-related differences in pessimism may help explain variation in investments across households.