Knowledge that Transforms

We evaluate empirically two sources of large takeover premiums: preemptive bidding and target resistance. We develop an auction model that features costly sequential entry of bidders in takeover contests and encompasses both explanations. We estimate the model parameters by simulated method of moments for a sample of US takeovers. Our estimates imply that target resistance explains the entire magnitude of the premium in 74% of successful single-bidder contests. Simulation experiments show that initial bidders have, on average, a higher valuation for the target than rival bidders, so that a relatively low initial bid is sufficient to deter a rival from entry.

Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay that need to be collateralized, resulting in a financing versus risk management trade-off. We study this trade-off in a dynamic model of commodity price risk management and show that risk management is limited and that more financially constrained firms hedge less or not at all. We show that these predictions are consistent with the evidence using panel data for fuel price risk management by airlines. More constrained airlines hedge less both in the cross section and within airlines over time. Risk management drops substantially as airlines approach distress and recovers only slowly after airlines enter distress.

We develop a speculation-based theory of home improvements. Housing services are produced from a mix of land and structures. Homeowners optimistic about future prices for these services speculate by making improvements, which we model as them increasing their structures holding fixed their land. The recoup value (the difference between the resale value of improvements and construction costs) is simultaneously increasing in home price appreciation and falls with construction cost growth. This prediction stands in contrast to a consumption-cum-financial constraints motive in which rising home prices loosen financial constraints and lead to lower recoup values. We provide evidence consistent with a speculative motive using data on the costs and recoup values of remodeling projects across US cities.

Using detailed publication and citation data for over 50,000 articles from 30 major economics and finance journals, we investigate whether network proximity to an editor influences research productivity. During an editor's tenure, his current university colleagues publish about 100% more papers in the editor's journal, compared to years when he is not editor. In contrast to editorial nepotism, such “inside” articles have significantly higher ex post citation counts, even when same-journal and self-cites are excluded. Our results thus suggest that despite potential conflicts of interest faced by editors, personal associations are used to improve selection decisions.

We provide a real-options model of an industry in which agents time abandonment of their projects in an effort to protect their reputations. Agents delay abandonment attempting to signal quality. When a public common shock forces abandonment of a small fraction of projects irrespective of agents' quality, many agents abandon their projects strategically even if they are unaffected by the shock. Such “blending in with the crowd” effect creates an additional incentive to delay abandonment ahead of the shock, leading to accumulation of “living dead” projects, which further amplifies the shock. The potential for moderate public common shocks often improves agents' values.

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure-related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their reelection to express displeasure over the directors’ ineffectiveness at monitoring managers. In a sample of securities class action lawsuits from 1996 to 2010, about 11% of independent directors are named as defendants. The likelihood of being named is greater for audit committee members and directors who sell stock during the class period. Named directors receive more negative recommendations from Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy advisory firm, and significantly more negative votes from shareholders than directors in a benchmark sample. They are also more likely than other independent directors to leave sued firms. Overall, shareholders use litigation along with director elections and director retention to hold some independent directors more accountable than others when firms experience financial fraud.

We study the financing policies of European public corporations prior to the euro crisis. Using data from 11 euro countries and a control group of five other European countries over 1991–2006, we show that nonfinancial firms from euro countries with previously weak currencies considerably increased their debt financing after the introduction of the euro. The results are stronger for large firms, firms dependent on external financing, and for the latter part of the post-euro time period. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that the supply of capital increased following the introduction of the euro.

Most home mortgages in the United States are fixed-rate loans with an embedded prepayment option. When long-term rates decline, the effective duration of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) falls due to heightened refinancing expectations. I show that these changes in MBS duration function as large-scale shocks to the quantity of interest rate risk that must be borne by professional bond investors. I develop a simple model in which the risk tolerance of bond investors is limited in the short run, so these fluctuations in MBS duration generate significant variation in bond risk premia. Specifically, bond risk premia are high when aggregate MBS duration is high. The model offers an explanation for why long-term rates could appear to be excessively sensitive to movements in short rates and explains how changes in MBS duration act as a positive-feedback mechanism that amplifies interest rate volatility. I find strong support for these predictions in the time series of US government bond returns.

This paper investigates whether investor-level taxes affect corporate payout policy decisions. We predict and find a surge of special dividends in the final months of 2010 and 2012, immediately before individual-level dividend tax rates were expected to increase. We also find evidence that immediately before the expected tax increases, firms altered the timing of their regular dividend payments by shifting what would normally be January regular dividend payments into the preceding December. To our knowledge this is the first evidence in the literature about changes in the timing of regular dividend payments in response to tax law changes. For both actions (specials and shifting), we find that it was more likely for a firm to respond to individual-level tax rates if insiders owned a relatively large amount of the firm. Overall, our paper provides evidence that managers consider individual-level taxes in making corporate payout decisions.

We describe a novel currency investment strategy, the ‘dollar carry trade,’ which delivers large excess returns, uncorrelated with the returns on well-known carry trade strategies. Using a no-arbitrage model of exchange rates we show that these excess returns compensate U.S. investors for taking on aggregate risk by shorting the dollar in bad times, when the U.S. price of risk is high. The countercyclical variation in risk premia leads to strong return predictability: the average forward discount and U.S. industrial production growth rates forecast up to 25% of the dollar return variation at the one-year horizon. The estimated model implies that the variation in the exposure of U.S. investors to worldwide risk is the key driver of predictability.