Knowledge that Transforms

Time-to-build, time-to-produce, and inventory have important implications for asset prices and quantity dynamics in a general equilibrium model with recursive preferences. Time-to-build captures the delay in transforming new investments into productive capital, and time-to-produce captures the delay in transforming productive capital into output. Both delays increase risks in that time-to-build generates procyclical payouts, whereas the time-to-produce amplifies this procyclicality. Inventory smooths consumption and helps capture interest rate volatility even when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is small. The model is consistent with a high equity premium, a high stock return volatility, and lead-lag relations between asset prices and macroeconomic quantities.

The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a prior connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner’s confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Personal connections to top executive branch officials can matter greatly even in a country with strong overall institutions, at least during a time of acute financial crisis and heightened policy discretion.

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are more likely to syndicate with each other. This homophily reduces the probability of investment success, and the detrimental effect is most prominent for early-stage investments. A variety of tests show that the cost of affinity is most likely attributable to poor decision-making by high-affinity syndicates after the investment is made. These results suggest that “birds-of-a-feather-flock-together” effects in collaboration can be costly.

We assess the yield impact of asset purchases within the European Central Bank׳s (ECB) Securities Markets Programme (SMP) in five euro area sovereign bond markets from 2010–11. In addition to large announcement effects, we find an impact of approximately −3 basis points at the five-year maturity for purchases of 1/1000 of the outstanding debt. Bond yield volatility and tail risk are lower on intervention days for most SMP countries. A dynamic specification points to both transitory and long-run effects. Purchases improved liquidity conditions and reduced default-risk premia, while the signaling of future low interest rates did not play a role.

Households that fail to refinance their mortgage when interest rates decline lose out on substantial savings. Using a random sample of outstanding US mortgages in December 2010, we estimate that approximately 20% of unconstrained households for whom refinancing was optimal had not done so. The median household would save $160/month over the remaining life of the loan, for a total present-discounted value of forgone savings of $11,500, a particularly large consumer financial mistake. To shed light on possible mechanisms, we also provide results from a mail campaign targeted at a sample of homeowners who could benefit from refinancing.

We investigate the relation between the option returns and the underlying stock's lottery-like characteristics. Call options written on the most lottery-like stocks underperform otherwise similar call options written on the least lottery-like stocks by 10–20% per month. Moreover, the more lottery-like the underlying stocks, the further and more frequently the options deviate from the put–call parity in the direction induced by overvalued calls. Furthermore, the lottery-like characteristic effect is stronger during periods of high investor sentiment. The results suggest that optimism-induced gambling preference causes lottery-like options to be overvalued.

We explore the impact of limited attention by analyzing the performance of hedge fund managers who are distracted by marital events. We find that marriages and divorces are associated with significantly lower fund alpha, during the six-month period surrounding and the two-year period after the event. Busy managers who manage multiple funds and who are not part of a team are more affected by marital transitions. Inattentive managers place fewer active bets relative to their style peers, load more on index stocks, exhibit higher R-squareds with respect to systematic factors, and are more prone to the disposition effect.

In this paper, we examine whether managers time their debt-equity choices to exploit market mispricing. Controlling for the level of external financing and corporate investment activities, we find evidence consistent with the market timing hypothesis. We find managers issue more equity relative to debt when analysts are relatively optimistic about firms’ long-term growth prospects. Moreover, equity issuers earn lower returns than debt issuers at subsequent earnings announcements. Controlling for research and development (R&D) investment, we find that, consistent with the market timing hypothesis and inconsistent with the extant empirical literature, the debt-equity composition of external financing predicts year-ahead stock return.

In dynamic financial markets the stochastic supply of risky assets has a significant informational role. Contrary to static models, where it acts as “noise,” in dynamic markets stochastic supply contains information about risk premiums. Acquiring private dividend information helps investors disentangle dividend information from discount-rate information contained in prices. For uninformed investors, however, as more informed investors enter the economy prices become more informative about dividends but less informative about discount rates. This tradeoff creates complementarities in information acquisition and multiple equilibria in the information market.

Using various centrality measures from social network analysis, we analyze how the location of a lead initial public offering (IPO) underwriter in its network of investment banks affects various IPO characteristics. We hypothesize that investment banking networks allow lead IPO underwriters to induce institutions to pay attention to the firms they take public and to perform two information-related roles during the IPO process: an information dissemination role, in which the lead underwriter uses its investment banking network to disseminate noisy information about various aspects of the IPO firm to institutional investors; and an information extraction role, in which the lead underwriter uses its investment banking network to extract information useful in pricing the IPO firm equity from institutional investors. Based on these two roles, we develop testable hypotheses relating lead IPO underwriter centrality to the IPO characteristics of firms they take public. We find that more central lead IPO underwriters are associated with larger absolute values of offer price revisions, greater IPO and after-market valuations, larger IPO initial returns, greater institutional investor equity holdings and analyst coverage immediately post-IPO, greater stock liquidity post-IPO, and better long-run stock returns. Using a hand-collected data set of pre-IPO media coverage as a proxy for investor attention, we show that an important channel through which more central lead IPO underwriters achieve favorable IPO characteristics is by attracting greater investor attention to the IPOs underwritten by them.