Knowledge that Transforms

We quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the specific collateral repurchase agreement (repo) rates of all outstanding U.S. Treasury securities. We find a positive and significant scarcity premium for on- and off-the-run Treasuries that persists for approximately 3 months and is larger in magnitude for shorter-term securities. This scarcity effect seems to pass through to Treasury cash market prices, providing additional evidence for the scarcity channel of quantitative easing (QE). On the contrary, the Federal Reserve’s reverse repo operations could help reduce the scarcity premium by alleviating potential shortages of high-quality collateral.

Short sellers are known to have private information about security prices. Empirical evidence of short selling, however, is based on only half of short sellers’ trading activity; specifically, the opening of the position. Using disclosed large-short-position data from the Japanese stock market, we provide the first detailed evidence of covering trades and find a positive reaction to short covering that only partially reverses. Although these results are consistent with substantial transaction costs for closing large short positions, they also reveal that some short sellers are privately informed about positive future events and have timing ability in covering positions.

Using unique U.S. Census data sets, we analyze how entrepreneurial firms’ product market characteristics affect their choice between going public, being acquired, or remaining private. Size, total factor productivity (TFP), sales growth, capital expenditure, market share, access to private funding, and human capital intensiveness significantly increase a private firm’s likelihood of an initial public offering (IPO) relative to an acquisition. Firms in industries with less information asymmetry and higher stock liquidity are more likely to choose an IPO over an acquisition. While TFP peaks around either form of exit, the rate of increase in TFP prior to acquisitions and the subsequent decrease is smaller than that around IPOs.

We propose a market-based framework that exploits time-varying parameter vector autoregressions to estimate the dynamic network of financial spillover effects. We apply it to financials in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and estimate interconnectedness at the sectoral and institutional levels. At the sectoral level, we uncover two main events in terms of interconnectedness: the Long-Term Capital Management crisis and the 2008 financial crisis. After these crisis events, we find a gradual decrease in interconnectedness, not observable using the classical rolling-window approach. At the institutional level, our framework delivers more stable interconnectedness rankings than other comparable market-based measures.

The value of corporate cash holdings has increased significantly in recent decades. On average, $1 of cash is valued at $0.61 in the 1980s, $1.04 in the 1990s, and $1.12 in the 2000s. This increase is predominantly driven by the investment opportunity set and cash-flow volatility, as well as secular trends in product market competition, credit market risk, and within-firm diversification. We document a secular decrease in the speed of adjustment (SOA) in cash holdings, particularly for financially constrained firms with cash deficits, suggesting that capital market frictions can account for the trend in the value of cash holdings.

There is a standard trade-off in compensation contracts between the provision of incentives and insurance. We hypothesize that this trade-off influences the precision with which firm performance is measured. We find that firm outcomes are measured less precisely when chance plays a large role in these outcomes. Further, this precision is determined through the choice of shares outstanding. This has several novel implications. Nominal stock prices can remain constant over time, and firms with unpredictable cash flows should have more shares and lower stock price levels, all else equal. We find evidence consistent with these implications.

This article provides evidence that firm value declines when credit default swaps (CDSs) are initiated and that the effect is greater when CDS trading activity is higher. This decline, which arises from an increase in the cost of capital as opposed to a decrease in free cash flows, traces to a deterioration in the firm’s credit quality and stock liquidity. Firm value declines less when CDS trading is likely to produce incremental information, suggesting that CDS trading has informational benefits for firm value. However, the evidence does not indicate that firm value increases because CDS availability facilitates investments.

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms’ corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are associated with greater synergies, superior long-run operating performance, and fewer write-offs of goodwill. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that cultural similarity eases post-deal integration. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of merger success, provide new evidence on the impact of corporate culture, and offer a new approach to defining firms’ cultural similarity.

In Mar. 2010, Japan’s financial regulator implemented the country’s first legislation concerning the disclosure of director compensation for named individuals. Using the first publicly available data for Japanese executives, we document direct evidence on the level, structure, and mechanisms of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Japan and perform a matched-sample comparison between Japan and the United States. In contrast to the findings of recent studies showing that international differentials in CEO pay have largely disappeared since the mid-2000s, our results show strikingly large differences between the Japanese and American systems that are difficult to explain by differences in conventional incentive contracts.

A major issue with predicting inflation rates using predictive regressions is that estimation errors can overwhelm the information content. This article proposes a new approach that uses a monetary-policy rule as a bridge between inflation rates and short-term interest rates and relies on the forward-interest-rate curve to predict future interest-rate movements. The 2-step procedure estimates the predictive relation not through a predictive regression but far more accurately through the contemporaneous monetary-policy linkage. Historical analysis shows that the approach outperforms random walk out of sample by 30%–50% over horizons from 1 to 5 years.