Knowledge that Transforms

Center for Research in Financial Services for financial support. The standard disclaimer applies. Optimal Financial Contracts for a Start-Up with Unlimited Operating Discretion This paper presents a model in which asymmetric information and extreme uncertainty lead to the exclusive use of equity and riskless debt for small business financing. The paper derives these results without any restrictions on the available contract space, the distribution function governing a project’s payoff, or the risk aversion of most potential entrepreneurs. Linear securities derive from the assumption that small business financing involves more uncertainty than is captured in most financial models. Instead of assuming that business people are faced with a given menu of projects, the model allows entrepreneurs to create (over time) an unlimited number of non-positive net present value projects with any payoff distribution they desire. Also, outside investors cannot observe project choice but only terminal cash flows. As a result, suppliers of funds must design contracts so that in equilibrium entrepreneurs do not wish to undertake undesirable investments. Further analysis of the model shows that in equilibrium entrepreneurs must contribute some

Prior research has used inaccurate classification rules to distinguish between stock splits and stock dividends. The CRSP classification of two-for-one stock distributions agrees with the actual accounting treatment only 23% of the time. In addition, the accounting treatment impacts the announcement period reaction—two-for-one distributions accounted for as stock dividends are associated with five-day announcement period returns of 2.70%, significantly greater that the 0.93% announcement returns for distributions accounted for as stock splits. Announcement returns are positively related to earnings growth in the two years following the distribution for stock dividend firms but not for stock split firms. The accounting choice appears to be used to confirm management's private information about future earnings revealed at the time of the distribution announcement.

We examine the fit between the ownership data provided by four surrogate databases and the data collected from proxy statements. We discover an unambiguous pecking order among the surrogates relative to the benchmark ownership statistics of corporate proxy statements. Corporate Text is first, followed in descending order by Compact Disclosure, Value Line, and Spectrum. Further tests show that reporting discrepancies in the Value Line and Spectrum databases could affect economic inferences drawn from regressions using their ownership data. A field guide describing each data source's reporting conventions, formats, and strate? gies for data aggregation may be downloaded from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis' web site (http.V/weber.u.washington.edu/~jfqa/hola7andeapdx.pdf).

Marc Bremer, Takato Hiraki, Richard J. Sweeney, Predictable Patterns after Large Stock Price Changes on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 345-365

This study examines the joint influence of board composition, leadership structure, and board ownership structure on the market's reaction to corporate antitakeover amendment proposals. The stock price reaction to antitakeover amendments is more negative when the board is dominated by inside and affiliated outside board members. Further, for firms in which the CEO also chairs the board, the reaction becomes increasingly negative as inside and affiliated outside board members increase their ownership stake in the firm and proportional representation on the board. In contrast, board composition and ownership structure have little power to explain the stock price reaction when the CEO does not chair the board. We conclude that monitoring by outside independent board members is important particularly when the CEO is also the board chair. The separation of ownership and control in the corporate form of business creates potential conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders. These conflicts can be mitigated by such internal governance characteristics as the compo? sition, ownership structure, and leadership structure ofthe firm's board of directors. In this study, we analyze the joint effect of these board monitoring characteristics on the stock market response to antitakeover amendment proposals. The study of antitakeover amendments is of particular importance because of the unresolved nature of the theoretical debate surrounding the amendments and the conflicting empirical evidence. Various types of antitakeover amendments exist, but all ostensibly make the takeover of a target firm more difficult with? out the cooperation of incumbent management. The amendments can be either beneficial or detrimental, depending on how managers use them. Managers can use the amendments to extract a higher takeover bid or to entrench themselves at shareholders' expense. The empirical evidence on the market's reaction to amend? ment announcements is also mixed. For example, Linn and McConnell (1983) and

We examine stock price behavior in response to initial coverage, buy recommendations that are pre-released to important clients before the stock market opens, and find a strong positive valuation effect at the open. On average, it takes five minutes of trading for NYSE/AMEX stocks and 15 minutes for NASDAQ stocks to reflect the private information contained in these analyst recommendations, so when informational asymmetry is high, the centralized call market is more efficient than a competitive, but fragmented dealer market. Public news release leaves share prices unaltered. Overall, competition among informed traders causes private information to be rapidly incorporated into stock prices.

Lawrence M. Benveniste, Walid Y. Busaba, Bookbuilding vs. Fixed Price: An Analysis of Competing Strategies for Marketing IPOs, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 383-403

Dongcheol Kim, A Reexamination of Firm Size, Book-To-Market, and Earnings Price in the Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 463-489

The average relative profitability of different firms in the economy jumps erratically. Al? though investors are unable to observe these productivity switches, they continuously update their beliefs regarding high and low productivity firms by observing the total return on each firm, which consists of the average productivity plus noise. The portfolio choices, interest rate, and stock return processes are derived in a Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (1985a) style general equilibrium model. Three stylized facts of stock market returns are addressed: negative skewness, excess kurtosis, and predictive asymmetry (excess returns and future changes in volatility are negatively correlated). To measure the last stylized fact, an EGARCH model is fitted to sample paths simulated from the model. Parameter values that permit faster learning fit the three facts better. I. Introduction This paper has three purposes. First, it presents the special properties of a filter in continuous time that characterizes the dynamics of Bayesian learning about recurrent profitability switches and their relation to fluctuating confidence. Second, the paper shows how fluctuating confidence, which arises due to this up? dating process, is reflected in the statistical properties of interest rate and stock return processes in a Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (1985a and b) (henceforth, CIR) stochas? tic production economy. Portfolio adjustments to hedge the exposure of the risk associated with these fluctuations are discussed. Finally, the paper draws some re? lationships between the speed of learning and the ability of the model to replicate three stylized facts about stock market returns. I argue that the often used Kalman filtering problem is not suitable to model fluctuating confidence and to replicate the three stylized facts.

This paper develops a corporate bond valuation model that takes into account both early default and interest rate risk. It corrects a defect of recent contributions where pricing equations do not assure that the payment to bondholders upon bankruptcy is no greater than firm value. The bankruptcy-triggering mechanism is directly related to the payoff received by bondholders when early bankruptcy is forced upon the firm. More specifically, the default barrier is defined simply as a fixed quantity discounted at the riskless rate up to the maturity date of the risky corporate bond. As soon as this threshold is crossed, bondholders receive an exogenously specified fraction of the remaining assets. Deviations from the absolute priority rule also are captured. Because it accounts for Gaussian interest rate uncertainty, default risk, and deviations from the absolute priority rule, this model is capable of producing quite diverse shapes for the term structure of yield spreads.