Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability and ambiguous tone on its borrowing costs. We find that firms with larger 10-K file sizes and a higher proportion of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-Ks have stricter loan contract terms and greater future stock price crash risk. Our results suggest that the readability and tone ambiguity of a firm’s financial disclosures are related to managerial information hoarding. Shareholders of firms with less readable and more ambiguous annual reports not only suffer from less transparent information disclosure but also bear the increased cost of external financing.

I examine acquisitions of private firms by public acquirers to better understand the effects of financial constraints on the division of economic gains in takeovers. Empirical tests exploit interstate bank branching deregulation, which relaxes financial constraints on private firms and can strengthen their bargaining position in an acquisition. Using a proxy for the degree to which targets depend on acquirers for financing, I find that private targets depend less on acquirers as a result of interstate bank branching deregulation. Relaxing financial constraints on private targets leads to an increase in target valuation multiples and a decrease in acquirer wealth gains.

The slope of the implied volatility term structure is positively related to future option returns. I rank firms based on the slope of the volatility term structure and analyze the returns for straddle portfolios. Straddle portfolios with high slopes of the volatility term structure outperform straddle portfolios with low slopes by an economically and statistically significant amount. The results are robust to different empirical setups and are not explained by traditional factors, higher-order option factors, or jump risk.

The shape of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) term structure conveys information about the price of variance risk rather than expected changes in the VIX, a rejection of the expectations hypothesis. The second principal component, SLOPE, summarizes nearly all this information, predicting the excess returns of synthetic Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 variance swaps, VIX futures, and S&P 500 straddles for all maturities and to the exclusion of the rest of the term structure. SLOPE’s predictability is incremental to other proxies for the conditional variance risk premia, economically significant, and inconsistent with standard asset pricing models.

We examine the impact of trading on markets partially exempt from National Market System requirements (“dark venues”) on equity-market quality. We find evidence consistent with the notion that dark venues rely on their special features to segregate order flow based on asymmetric information risk, which results in their transactions being less informed and contributing less to price discovery on the consolidated market. Except for the execution of large transactions and trading in small stocks, the effects of dark-venue order segmentation are damaging to overall market quality. Our results have important implications for the regulation of international equity markets.

We compare two bootstrap methods for assessing mutual fund performance. The first produces narrow confidence intervals due to pooling over time, whereas the second produces wider confidence intervals because it preserves the cross correlation of fund returns. We then show that the average U.K. equity mutual fund manager is unable to deliver outperformance net of fees under either bootstrap. Gross of fees, 95% of fund managers on the basis of the first bootstrap and all fund managers on the basis of the second bootstrap fail to outperform the luck distribution of gross returns.

We use high-frequency data to precisely estimate bond price reactions to macroeconomic announcements and the associated compensation for macro risks. We find evidence of a single factor summarizing the reaction of bond prices to different announcements. Before the financial crisis, the factor risk premium is substantial, significant, and mainly earned before announcement releases. After the crisis, the stock–bond covariance becomes negative and the preannouncement factor risk premium becomes insignificant. Our empirical results are consistent with information leakages that take place ahead of announcement releases and with the implications of a long-run risks model of bond risk premia.

This paper examines management’s motives for rejecting takeover bids and the associated shareholder wealth effects. We develop measures of initial bid quality and find a significant negative correlation between the quality of a bid and rejection. The likelihood of higher follow-on offers decreases with bid quality and is greater when targets have classified boards and chief executive officers (CEOs) with significant personal wealth tied to the transaction. Target CEOs who fail to close high-quality offers experience a significant rate of forced turnover. Overall, the results support a price improvement motive for contested bids.

In this article, I study the predictability of bond risk premia by means of expectations to future business conditions using survey forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. I show that expected business conditions consistently affect excess bond returns and that the inclusion of expected business conditions in standard predictive regressions improve forecast performance relative to models using information derived from the current term structure or macroeconomic variables. The results are confirmed in a real-time out-of-sample exercise, where the predictive accuracy of the models is evaluated both statistically and from the perspective of a mean-variance investor that trades in the bond market.

Using survey data, we analyze institutional investors’ expectations about the future performance of fund managers and the impact of those expectations on asset allocation decisions. We find that institutional investors allocate funds mainly on the basis of fund managers’ past performance and of investment consultants’ recommendations, but not because they extrapolate their expectations from these. This suggests that institutional investors base their investment decisions on the most defensible variables at their disposal and supports the existence of agency considerations in their decision making.