Knowledge that Transforms

Early access to stock recommendations provides brokerage firm clients with incremental investment value. After controlling for transaction costs, purchasing (selling) quickly following upgrades (downgrades) results in average two-day returns of 1.02% (1.50%). Short-term profit opportunities persist for two hours following the pre-market release of new recommendations. The results are robust within sub-periods and a calendar-based strategy produces positive abnormal daily returns of over 10 basis points, or roughly 30% annualized. Recommending firms' market makers shift their quotes accordingly, providing indirect evidence that clients make use of the informational advantage that arises from analysts' opinion changes.

According to conventional wisdom, industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots. SUR tests on panels of monthly Group of Ten (G-10) log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0.5% to 15%. On average, in out-of-sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods. For monthly data, the range of expected USD-DEM appreciation rates exceeds 15% per year in the mean reversion model. Mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models: over the sample period, the G-10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long-run nominal rates.

We analyze allocations to institutional and retail investors in 441 initial public offerings (IPOs). In addition to the well-known favorable first-day returns, we show that institutions also obtain more allocations in IPOs with better long-term performance. We find that initial institutional flips help predict future returns, suggesting that at least some institutions retain valuable private information about IPO firms. Collectively, these findings illustrate the importance of aftermarket relations between underwriters and investors and that underwriters have discretionary means to compensate IPO investors beyond first-day returns and price stabilization.

We analyze the price reaction to analysts' revisions by testing the Griffin and Tversky (1992) hypothesis that agents place emphasis on the strength of the signal (the dramatic nature of the event) and may de-emphasize the weight (the ability of the analyst making the recommendation). Two attributes, namely, years of experience and the reputation of the analysts' brokerage houses form proxies for analyst ability (or weight) that we validate by documenting that revisions by high ability analysts outperform those by low ability ones. We find evidence of return persistence following small (low strength) revisions by high ability analysts and the opposite return pattern following large (high strength) revisions of low ability analysts, consistent with the arguments of Griffin and Tversky (1992). Our study provides an empirical link between evidence on individual decision making and stock market returns, and also helps promote an understanding of the analyst industry as well as its interaction with the investing population.

In spite of the growing research concerning investor protection, the relation between investor protection and real investment by foreign multinationals is largely unexplored. Recognizing this relation, however, is especially important in light of the surge in cross-border activity in recent decades and the potential impact cross-border investment can have on a country's economic development. We find that U.S. multinational foreign investment is significantly greater both when shareholder protection is poor and when creditor protection is poor. Consistent with existing literature, our results suggest that U.S. firms have greater comparative advantages when local firms in poor investor protection countries either i) invest suboptimally due to agency problems or ii) have constrained access to debt capital. The increased investment by U.S. multinationals in poor investor protection countries is of particular interest, because it suggests an important way in which adverse outcomes related to poor investor protection may be mitigated.

This paper measures changes in mutual fund trading costs following two reductions in the tick size of U.S. equity markets: the switch from eighths to sixteenths and the subsequent switch to decimals. We estimate trading costs by comparing a mutual fund's daily returns to the daily returns of a synthetic benchmark portfolio that matches the fund's holdings but has zero trading costs by construction. We find that the average change in trading costs of actively managed funds was positive following both reductions in tick size with a larger and statistically significant increase following decimalization. In contrast, index fund trading costs were unaffected.

Mimicking portfolios have long been useful in asset pricing research. In most empirical applications, the portfolio weights are assumed to be fixed over time, while in theory they may be functions of the economic state. This paper derives and characterizes mimicking portfolios in the presence of predetermined state variables, or conditioning information. The results generalize and integrate multifactor minimum variance efficiency (Fama (1996)) with conditional and unconditional mean-variance efficiency (Hansen and Richard (1987), Ferson and Siegel (2001)). Empirical examples illustrate the potential importance of time-varying mimicking portfolio weights and highlight challenges in their application.

Contrary to Baker and Wurgler (2002), I find that the importance of historical average market-to-book ratios in leverage regressions is not due to past equity market timing. Although equity transactions may be timed to equity market conditions, they do not have significant long lasting effects on capital structure. Debt transactions exhibit timing patterns that are unlikely to induce a negative relation between market-to-book ratios and leverage. I also find that historical average market-to-book ratios have significant effects on current financing and investment decisions, implying that they contain information about growth opportunities not captured by current market-to-book ratios.

This article examines managerial ownership structure and at-issue yield spreads on corporate bonds. There is a positive relation between managerial ownership and borrowing costs, and this relation is weaker at higher levels of ownership. In addition, managerial stock options have a larger effect on yield spreads than stock ownership. These effects exist after controlling for firm and bond characteristics, and are robust to endogeneity and sample selection concerns. The evidence suggests that rational bondholders price new debt issues using the information about a firm's future risk choices contained in managerial incentive structures, and that lenders anticipate higher risk-taking incentives from managerial stock options than from equity ownership.

We examine the role of financial analysts in forming institutional investors' investment decisions. In our model, a fund manager invests in a stock based on the optimal weighting of reports created by a biased sell-side analyst and an unbiased buy-side analyst. The manager puts a higher weight on the buy-side analyst's report when the quality of the buyside analyst's information relative to that of the sell-side analyst increases, or when the sell-side analyst's degree of bias or uncertainty about the bias increases. Utilizing a unique dataset of U.S. equity funds, we find evidence supporting our model predictions on how fund managers weigh buy-side research relative to sell-side and independent research.