Among high active share portfolios—whose holdings differ substantially from their benchmark—only those with patient investment strategies (with holding durations of over two years) on average outperform, over 2% per year. Funds trading frequently generally underperform, including those with high active share. Among patient funds, separating closet index from high active share funds matters, as low active share funds on average underperform even with patient strategies. Our results suggest that U.S. equity markets provide opportunities for longer-term active managers, perhaps because of the limited arbitrage capital devoted to patient and active investment strategies. The Online Appendix is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2810798.

We investigate the relation between the CEO Pay Slice (CPS)—the fraction of the aggregate compensation of the top-five executive team captured by the Chief Executive Officer—and the value, performance, and behavior of public firms. The CPS could reflect the relative importance of the CEO as well as the extent to which the CEO is able to extracts rents. We find that, controlling for all standard controls, CPS is negatively associated with firm value as measured by industry-adjusted Tobin's q. CPS also has a rich set of relations with firms' behavior and performance. In particular, CPS is correlated with lower (industry-adjusted) accounting profitability, lower stock returns accompanying acquisitions announced by the firm and higher likelihood of a negative stock return accompanying such announcements, higher odds of the CEO receiving a lucky option grant at the lowest price of the month, lower performance sensitivity of CEO turnover, and lower stock market returns accompanying the filing of proxy statements for periods when CPS increases. Taken together, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that higher CPS is associated with agency problems and indicate that CPS can provide a useful tool for studying the performance and behavior of firms.

We show that at-the-money implied volatility of options on futures of five-year Treasury notes (Treasury “yield implied volatility”) predicts both the growth rate and volatility of gross domestic product, as well as of other macroeconomic variables, like industrial production, consumption, and employment. This predictability is robust to controlling for the term spread, credit spread, stock returns, stock market implied volatility, and several other variables that prior literature showed to predict macroeconomic activity. Our results indicate that Treasury yield implied volatility is a useful forward-looking state variable to characterize risks and opportunities in the macro economy.

This paper revisits the association between firm value (as proxied by Tobin’s Q) and whether the firm has a staggered board. As is well known, in the cross-section firms with a staggered board tend to have a lower value. Using a comprehensive sample for 1978 – 2011, we show an opposite result in the time series: firms that adopt a staggered board increase in firm value, while de-staggering is associated with a decrease in firm value. We further show that the decision to adopt a staggered board seems endogenous, and related to an ex ante lower firm value, which helps reconciling the existing cross-sectional results to our novel time series results. To explain our new results, we explore potential incentive problems in the shareholder-manager relationship. Short-term oriented shareholders may generate myopic incentives for the firm to underinvest in risky long-term projects. In this case, a staggered board may helpfully insulate the board from opportunistic shareholder pressure. Consistent with this, we find that the adoption of a staggered board has a stronger positive association with firm value for firms where such incentive problems are likely more severe: firms with more R&D, more intangible assets, more innovative and larger and thus likely more complex firms.