Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the impact of a rule in the Canadian equities market that requires dark orders to offer price improvement over displayed orders. We show that this rule eliminated intermediation of retail orders in the dark and shifted retail orders onto the lit market with the lowest trading fee. Intermediaries shifted liquidity supply to this market leading to increased displayed liquidity. We conclude that reducing retail order segmentation enhances lit liquidity. Despite the improvement in liquidity, retail traders receive less price improvement. Retail brokers pay higher trading fees to exchanges, and high-frequency traders earn higher revenues from trading fees.

The majority of common stocks that have appeared in the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing 4% of listed companies explain the net gain for the entire US stock market since 1926, as other stocks collectively matched Treasury bills. These results highlight the important role of positive skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns, attributable to skewness in monthly returns and to the effects of compounding. The results help to explain why poorly diversified active strategies most often underperform market averages.

We construct a measure of the pairwise relatedness of firms’ human capital to examine whether human capital relatedness is a key factor in mergers and acquisitions. We find that mergers are more likely and merger returns and postmerger performance are higher when firms have related human capital. These relations are stronger or only present in acquisitions where the merging firms do not operate in the same industries or product markets. Reductions in employment and wages following mergers with high human capital relatedness suggest that the merged firm has greater ability to layoff low quality and/or duplicate employees and reduce labor costs. We further show in a falsification test that human capital relatedness has no effect on acquiring firm returns in asset sales when little or no labor is transferred, which helps validate our measure of human capital relatedness.

We combine annual stock market data for the most important equity markets of the last four centuries: the Netherlands and UK (1629–1812), UK (1813–1870), and US (1871–2015). We show that dividend yields are stationary and consistently forecast returns. The documented predictability holds for annual and multi-annual horizons and works both in- and out-of-sample, providing strong evidence that expected returns in stock markets are time-varying. In part, this variation is related to the business cycle, with expected returns increasing in recessions. We also find that, except for the period after 1945, dividend yields predict dividend growth rates.

This paper examines the role of investments by angel groups across a heterogeneous set of 21 countries with varying entrepreneurship ecosystems. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of deals around the groups’ funding thresholds, we find a positive impact of funding on firm growth, performance, survival, and follow-on fundraising, which is independent of the level of venture activity and entrepreneur-friendliness in the country. However, the maturity of startups that apply for funding (and are ultimately funded) inversely correlates with the entrepreneurship-friendliness of the country. This may reflect self-censoring by early-stage firms that do not expect to receive funding in these environments.

This paper investigates whether elections delay regulatory action against failing financial institutions by exploiting the cross-sectional and time-series heterogeneity in the exogenous electoral cycles of US insurance regulators and governors. We find causal evidence that regulators delay interventions before elections. The extent of the delay is larger for elected regulators than regulators appointed by the governor. Interventions by appointed regulators are less likely before competitive gubernatorial elections. Regulatory governance mechanisms that constrain the discretion of regulators reduce the delays of appointed regulators but not elected. Finally, we find evidence that suggests electoral delays increase the ultimate costs of failure.

This is a study of how contractual mechanisms can mitigate agency conflicts in sub-advised mutual funds. Sub-advising contracts allow fund families to expand their product offerings to include new investment styles and thereby gain market share. We show that costly contractual arrangements, such as co-branding, multi-advising, and performance-based compensation, can mitigate agency conflicts in outsourcing and protect investors from potential underperformance. Fund families will find it cost-effective to implement such incentive mechanisms only when investors are sophisticated in assessing manager skill. The findings help to explain why a large percentage of fund families outsource their funds to advisory firms.

Based on high frequency S & P 500 exchange-traded fund (ETF) data from 1993–2013, we show an intraday momentum pattern: the first half-hour return on the market as measured from the previous day’s market close predicts the last half-hour return. This predictability, which is both statistically and economically significant, is stronger on more volatile days, on higher volume days, on recession days, and on major macroeconomic news release days. Intraday momentum also exists for ten other most actively traded domestic and international ETFs. Theoretically, the intraday momentum is consistent not only with Bogousslavsky’s (2016) model of infrequent portfolio rebalancing but also with a model of late-informed trading near the market close.

This paper constructs and analyzes various measures of trading costs in US equity markets covering the period 1926–2015. These measures contain statistically and economically significant predictive signals for stock market returns and real economic activity. We decompose illiquidity proxies into a component capturing aggregate volatility and a residual. The predictive content of these components differs in important ways. Specifically, we find strong evidence that the component of illiquidity uncorrelated with volatility forecasts stock market returns. Both the volatility and residual components of illiquidity contain information regarding future economic activity.

This paper investigates execution quality issues in corporate bond trading. Using an extensive sample of bond trades by insurance companies, we find that an insurance company entering a trade of similar size and on the same side for the same bond on the same day with the same dealer will receive a better price if the insurance company is a more active trader than if it is a less active trader. Trading with the dominant dealer or underwriter worsens these differentials, while greater transparency and smaller trading networks lessens these effects. Our results provide strong evidence that execution quality differences remain pervasive in corporate bond trading.