We present and test an infinite-horizon, continuous-time model of a firm that can dynamically adjust the use of risk management instruments which seek to reduce product price uncertainty and thereby mitigate financial distress losses and reduce taxes. The dynamic setting relaxes several restrictive assumptions common to static models. In the model, the firm can adjust its use and the hedge ratio and maturity of risk management instruments over time, risk management instruments expire as time progresses, the available maturity of the risk management instruments is shorter than the lifetime of the firm, and transaction costs are associated with initiation and adjustment of risk management contracts. The model produces a number of new time-series and cross-sectional implications on how firms use short-term instruments to hedge long-term cash flow uncertainty. Numerical results describe the optimal timing, adjustment, and rollover of risk management instruments and the choice of contract maturity and hedge ratio in response to changes in the firm's product price. The results show that the structure of transaction costs can have an important effect on the firm's risk management strategy. The model predicts that firms that are either far from financial distress or deep in financial distress neither initiate nor adjust their risk management instruments, while firms between the two extremes initiate and actively adjust their risk management instruments. Using quarterly panel data on gold mining firms between 1993 and 1999, we find evidence of a non-monotonic relation between measures of financial distress and risk management activity consistent with the model. We also provide evidence supportive of the model's predictions with respect to the maturity choice of risk management contracts.

We catalog the complete contents of Institutional Investor All-American analyst reports and examine the market reaction to their release. Including the justifications supporting an analyst's opinion reduces, and in some models eliminates, the significance of earnings forecasts and recommendation revisions. Analysts both provide new information and interpret previously released information. The information in a report is most important for downgrades; target prices and the analyst's justifications are the only significant elements for reiterations. No correlation exists between valuation methodology and either analyst accuracy or the market's reaction to a report. Our adjusted R2s are much larger than those of studies using only summary measures.

This paper presents striking evidence that option trading changes the prices of underlying stocks. In particular, we show that on expiration dates the closing prices of stocks with listed options cluster at option strike prices. On each expiration date, the returns of optionable stocks are altered by an average of at least 16.5 basis points, which translates into aggregate market capitalization shifts on the order of $9 billion. We provide evidence that hedge rebalancing by option market makers and stock price manipulation by firm proprietary traders contribute to the clustering.

We consider how fund managers respond to the conflicting preferences of their investors. We focus on the conflict between the taxable and retirement accounts of international funds, which face different tradeoffs between dividends and capital gains. In principle, managers could resolve this conflict through dividend arbitrage, but a proprietary database of dividend-arbitrage transactions shows that in practice they cannot. Thus, managers must resolve it through their investment policies. We find robust evidence that managers with more retirement money favor the preferences of retirement investors and further evidence for this view in the difference between U.S. and Canadian funds’ portfolio weights.

To test recent theories suggesting that valuation errors affect merger activity, we develop a decomposition that breaks the market-to-book ratio (M/B) into three components: the firm-specific pricing deviation from short-run industry pricing; sector-wide, short-run deviations from firms’ long-run pricing; and long-run pricing to book. We find strong support for recent theories by Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan [2004. Market valuation and merger waves. Journal of Finance, forthcoming] and Shleifer and Vishny [2003. Stock market driven acquisitions. Journal of Financial Economics 70, 295–311], which predict that misvaluation drives mergers. So much of the behavior of M/B is driven by firm-specific deviations from short-run industry pricing, that long-run components of M/B run counter to the conventional wisdom: Low long-run value to book firms buy high long-run value-to-book firms. Misvaluation affects who buys whom, as well as method of payment, and combines with neoclassical explanations to explain aggregate merger activity.