Knowledge that Transforms

This paper analyzes the determinants of partial ownership of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms and, in particular, the marked decline in the use of joint ventures over the last 20 years. The evidence indicates that whole ownership is most common when firms coordinate integrated production activities across different locations, transfer technology, and benefit from worldwide tax planning. Because operations and ownership levels are jointly determined, it is helpful to use the liberalization of ownership restrictions by host countries and the imposition of joint venture tax penalties in the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986 as instruments for ownership levels to identify these effects. Firms responded to these regulatory and tax changes by using wholly owned affiliates instead of joint ventures and expanding intrafirm trade and technology transfer. The implied complementarity of whole ownership and intrafirm trade suggests that the reduced costs of engaging in integrated global operations contributed substantially to the sharply declining propensity of American firms to organize their foreign operations as joint ventures over the last two decades. Estimates imply that as much as one-fifth to three-fifths of the decline in the use of joint ventures by multinational firms is attributable to the increased importance of intrafirm transactions. The forces of globalization appear to have diminished, rather than accelerated, the use of shared ownership.

We assess the market microstructure properties of U.S. banking firms’ equity, to determine whether they exhibit more or less evidence of asset opaqueness than similar-sized nonbanking firms. The evidence indicates that large bank holding companies (BHC), traded on the NYSE, have very similar trading properties to their matched nonfinancial firms. In contrast, smaller BHCs, traded on NASDAQ, trade much less frequently despite having very similar spreads. Analysis of IBES earnings forecasts indicates that banking assets are not unusually opaque; they are simply boring. The implications for regulatory policy and future market microstructure research are discussed.

During the 1997 Korean financial crisis, firms with higher ownership concentration by unaffiliated foreign investors experienced a smaller reduction in their share value. Firms that had higher disclosure quality and alternative sources of external financing also suffered less. In contrast, chaebol firms with concentrated ownership by controlling family shareholders experienced a larger drop in the value of their equity. Firms in which the controlling shareholders’ voting rights exceeded cash flow rights and those who borrowed more from the main banks also had lower returns. Our results suggest that change in firm value during a crisis is a function of firm-level differences in corporate governance measures.

This paper provides a method for estimating the market risk premium that accounts for shifts in investment opportunities by explicitly modeling the underlying process governing the level of market volatility. I find that approximately 50% of the measured risk premium is related to the risk of future changes in investment opportunities. Evidence of a structural shift in the underlying volatility process suggests that the simple historical average of excess market returns may substantially overstate the magnitude of the market risk premium for the period since the Great Depression.

This paper studies the relation between order imbalances and daily returns of individual stocks. Our tests are motivated by a model which considers how market makers dynamically accommodate autocorrelated imbalances emanating from large traders who optimally choose to split their orders. Price pressures caused by autocorrelated imbalances cause a positive relation between lagged imbalances and returns, which reverses sign after controlling for the current imbalance. We find empirical evidence consistent with these implications. We also find that imbalance-based trading strategies yield statistically significant returns. Our results shed light on the role of inventory effects in daily stock price movements.

Each NYSE specialist firm provides liquidity for more than one common stock. As a result of shared capital and information among specialists within a firm, we argue that stock liquidity will co-move with the liquidity of other stocks handled by the same specialist firm, with magnitude increasing with the risk of providing liquidity. The evidence indicates that individual stock liquidity co-varies with specialist portfolio liquidity apart from information reflected by market liquidity variation. Further tests based on specialist firm size, specialist firm mergers, and market returns indicate that liquidity co-variation increases with the risk of providing liquidity.

A dividend imputation tax system provides shareholders with a credit (for corporate tax paid) that can be used to offset personal tax on dividend income. This paper shows how to infer the value of imputation tax credits from the prices of derivative securities that are unique to Australian retail markets. We also test whether a tax law amendment that was designed to prevent the trading of imputation credits affected their economic value. Before the amendment, tax credits were worth up to 50% of face value in large, high-yielding companies, but subsequently it is difficult to detect any value at all.

Unlike previous studies that examine how emerging market return volatility changes subsequent to stock market liberalization, this paper investigates the impact of investibility, or the degree to which a stock can be foreign-owned, on emerging market volatility. We find a positive relation between return volatility and the investibility of individual stocks, even after controlling for country, industry, firm size, and turnover. We also find that a highly investible emerging market portfolio is subject to larger world market exposure than a non-investible portfolio, suggesting that highly investible stocks are more integrated with the world and therefore more vulnerable to world market risk.

This paper uses information on individual loan contracts to study the effects of government ownership on bank lending behavior. State-owned banks charge lower interest rates than do privately owned banks to similar or identical firms, even if firms are able to borrow more from privately owned banks. State-owned banks mostly favor large firms and firms located in depressed areas. The lending behavior of state-owned banks is affected by the electoral results of the party affiliated with the bank: the stronger the political party in the area where the firm is borrowing, the lower the interest rates charged.

We examine a sample of 12,023 acquisitions by public firms from 1980 to 2001. The equally weighted abnormal announcement return is 1.1%, but acquiring-firm shareholders lose $25.2 million on average upon announcement. This disparity suggests the existence of a size effect in acquisition announcement returns. The announcement return for acquiring-firm shareholders is roughly two percentage points higher for small acquirers irrespective of the form of financing and whether the acquired firm is public or private. The size effect is robust to firm and deal characteristics, and it is not reversed over time.