Knowledge that Transforms

Relatively little is known about the trading volume in derivatives relative to the volume in underlying stocks. We study the time-series properties and the determinants of the options/stock trading volume ratio (O/S) using a comprehensive cross-section and time-series of data on equities and their listed options. O/S is related to many intuitive determinants such as delta and trading costs, and it also varies with institutional holdings, analyst following, and analyst forecast dispersion. O/S is higher around earnings announcements, suggesting increased trading in the options market. Further, post-announcement absolute returns are positively related to pre-announcement O/S, which suggests that at least part of the pre-announcement options trading is informed.

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of performance patterns for emerging funds and managers in the hedge fund industry. Emerging funds and managers have particularly strong financial incentives to create investment performance and, because of their size, may be more nimble than established ones. Performance measurement, however, needs to control for the usual biases afflicting hedge fund databases. After adjusting for such biases and using a novel event time approach, we find strong evidence of outperformance during the first two to three years of existence. Each additional year of age decreases performance by 42 basis points, on average. Cross-sectionally, early performance by individual funds is quite persistent, with early strong performance lasting for up to five years.

Incomplete contracting theory suggests that venture capitalist (VC) cash flow rights, including liquidation preferences, could be subject to renegotiation. Using a hand-collected data set of sales of Silicon Valley firms, we find common shareholders do sometimes receive payment before VCs’ liquidation preferences are satisfied. However, such deviations from VCs' cash flow rights tend to be small. We also find that renegotiation is more likely when governance arrangements, including the firm's choice of corporate law, give common shareholders more power to impede the sale. Our study provides support for incomplete contracting theory, improves understanding of VC exits, and suggests that choice of corporate law matters in private firms.

I conduct an empirical investigation into the pricing of subprime asset-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and their contagion effects on other markets. Using data for the ABX subprime indexes, I find strong evidence of contagion in the financial markets. The results support the hypothesis that financial contagion was propagated primarily through liquidity and risk-premium channels, rather than through a correlated-information channel. Surprisingly, ABX index returns forecast stock returns and Treasury and corporate bond yield changes by as much as three weeks ahead during the subprime crisis. This challenges the popular view that the market prices of these “toxic assets” were unreliable; the results suggest that significant price discovery did in fact occur in the subprime market during the crisis.

We examine whether securitization impacts renegotiation decisions of loan servicers, focusing on their decision to foreclose a delinquent loan. Conditional on a loan becoming seriously delinquent, we find a significantly lower foreclosure rate associated with bank-held loans when compared to similar securitized loans: across various specifications and origination vintages, the foreclosure rate of delinquent bank-held loans is 3% to 7% lower in absolute terms (13% to 32% in relative terms). There is a substantial heterogeneity in these effects with large effects among borrowers with better credit quality and small effects among lower quality borrowers. A quasi-experiment that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in securitization status of a delinquent loan confirms these results.

Non-linear external habit persistence models, which feature prominently in the recent “equity premium” asset pricing and macroeconomics literature, generate counterfactual predictions in the cross-section of stock returns. In particular, we show that in the absence of cross-sectional heterogeneity in firms’ cash-flow risk, these models produce a “growth premium,” that is, stocks with high price-to-fundamental ratios command a higher premium than stocks with low price-to-fundamental ratios. This implication is at odds with the well-established empirical observation of a “value premium” in the cross-section of stock returns. Substantial heterogeneity in firms’ cash-flow risk yields both a value premium as well as most of the stylized facts about the cross-section of stock returns, but it generates a “cash-flow risk puzzle”: Quantitatively, value stocks have to have “too much” cash-flow risk compared to the data to generate empirically plausible value premiums.

We develop and implement a technique for closed-form maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of multifactor affine yield models. We derive closed-form approximations to likelihoods for nine Dai and Singleton (2000) affine models. Simulations show our technique very accurately approximates true (but infeasible) MLE. Using US Treasury data, we estimate nine affine yield models with different market price of risk specifications. MLE allows non-nested model comparison using likelihood ratio tests; the preferred model depends on the market price of risk. Estimation with simulated and real data suggests our technique is much closer to true MLE than Euler and quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) methods.

We examine the market response to an unexpected announcement of the sale of government-owned shares in China. In contrast to earlier work, we find a negative effect of government ownership on returns at the announcement date and a symmetric positive effect from the policy's cancellation. We suggest that this results from the absence of a Chinese political transition to accompany economic reforms, so that the benefits of political ties outweigh the efficiency costs of government shareholdings. Companies managed by former government officials have positive abnormal returns, suggesting that personal ties can substitute for government ownership as a source of connections.

We solve for optimal portfolios when interest rates and labor income are stochastic with the expected income growth being affine in the short-term interest rate in order to encompass business cycle variations in wages. Our calibration based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data supports this relation with substantial variation across individuals in the slope of this affine function. The slope is crucial for the valuation and riskiness of human capital and for the optimal stock/bond/cash allocation both in an unconstrained complete market and in an incomplete market with liquidity and short-sales constraints.

We examine how state antitakeover laws affect bondholders and the cost of debt, and report four findings. First, bonds issued by firms incorporated in takeover-friendly states have significantly higher at-issue yield spreads than bonds issued by firms in states with restrictive antitakeover laws. Second, firms in takeover friendly states have significantly higher leverage than their counterparts in restrictive law states. Third, bond issues are associated with negative average stock price reactions among firms in takeover-friendly states, but positive stock price reactions among firms in restrictive law states. Fourth, existing bond values increase, on average, upon the introduction of Business Combination antitakeover law. These results indicate that state antitakeover laws tend to decrease bond yields and increase bond values, which is the opposite of their effect on equity values. This, in turn, implies that state laws help mitigate the agency cost of debt by shielding bondholders from expropriation in takeovers. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that the effect of antitakeover provisions on firm value must take into account the impacts of both bondholders and stockholders.