Knowledge that Transforms

We measure market reactions to announcements concerning liquidity regulation, a key innovation in the Basel framework. Our initial results show that liquidity regulation attracts negative abnormal returns. However, the price responses are less pronounced when coinciding announcements concerning capital regulation are backed out, suggesting that markets do not consider liquidity regulation to be binding. Bank- and country-specific characteristics also matter. Liquid balance sheets and high charter values increase abnormal returns whereas smaller long-term funding mismatches reduce abnormal returns. Banks located in countries with large government debt and tight interbank conditions or with prior domestic liquidity regulation display lower abnormal returns.

Surprisingly few papers have attempted to develop a direct empirical test for overbidding in merger and acquisition contests. We develop such a test grounded on a necessary condition for profit-maximizing bidding behavior. The test is not subject to endogeneity concerns. Our results strongly support the existence of overbidding. We provide evidence that overbidding is related to conflicts of interest, but also some indirect evidence that it arises from failing to fully account for the winner’s curse.

The impact of liquidity-motivated institutional trading on firms’ real decisions is not confined to periods of financial crisis. Firms subject to mutual fund flow-driven selling pressure reduce share issuance and investment, whereas firms experiencing buying pressure do not increase investment, although they issue more equity. Firms under extreme selling pressure cut quarterly investment by 0.075 percentage points of total assets, which is 4.3% of the average quarterly investment in our sample. We also find evidence that the effect is not attributed to managerial learning or catering incentives. Rather, flow-driven trading affects investment mainly through its impact on the financing cost.

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and their directors. The majority of directorships are held by extremely busy independent directors. These directors are sought by funds because they have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high-quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with investor withdrawals. Moreover, funds with busy independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, abuse discretionary liquidity restrictions, or engage in performance-based risk shifting.

By collecting and disseminating price-sensitive information, financial analysts should reduce firm insiders’ informational advantage with a consequent impact on trading dynamics and market quality. We empirically examine the impact of complete analysts’ coverage termination on stocks’ liquidity, price discovery, and insider trading profitability. Termination leads to deteriorating liquidity and price efficiency, more informed trading, and higher profitability of insider trades. The magnitude of these effects depends on the strength of insiders’ ownership and on management’s decision whether to improve the firm’s information environment after coverage termination. Institutional investors alleviate, but do not eliminate, the negative effects of termination.

We find that consumption risk is lower in states that implement countercyclical fiscal policies. Moreover, firms with an investor base that is concentrated in countercyclical states have lower stock returns, along with firms that relocate their headquarters to a countercyclical state. Therefore, countercyclical fiscal policies lower the consumption risk of investors and, consequently, their required equity return premium. This conclusion is confirmed by smaller declines in market participation during recessions in countercyclical states. Overall, the location of a firm’s investor base enables state-level fiscal policy to influence stock returns.

We investigate an increasingly prevalent CEO succession strategy: recruiting CEOs from the board of directors (director–CEOs). Director–CEOs might be hired in a planned succession because they combine outsiders’ new perspectives with insiders’ firm-specific knowledge. Alternatively, directors may be recruited when the board is unprepared for a leadership change. We find that unplanned successions, in which director–CEOs are appointed as a “quick-fix” solution, result in a negative market reaction, deterioration in performance, and ill-fitting candidates with shorter tenures. Conversely, firms recruiting director–CEOs in planned successions perform similarly to other firms. We find no evidence that poor firm quality drives these results.

We provide an entropy approach for measuring the asymmetric comovement between the return on a single asset and the market return. This approach yields a model-free test for stock return asymmetry, generalizing the correlation-based test proposed by Hong, Tu, and Zhou (2007). Based on this test, we find that asymmetry is much more pervasive than previously thought. Moreover, our approach also provides an entropy-based measure of downside asymmetric comovement. In the cross section of stock returns, we find an asymmetry premium: Higher downside asymmetric comovement with the market indicates higher expected returns.

We consider the estimation methods for the rank of a beta matrix corresponding to a multifactor model and study which method would be appropriate for data with a large number of assets. Our simulation results indicate that a restricted version of Cragg and Donald’s (1997) Bayesian information criterion estimator is quite reliable for such data. We use this estimator to analyze some selected asset pricing models with U.S. stock returns. Our results indicate that the beta matrix from many models fails to have full column rank, suggesting that risk premiums in these models are underidentified.

Stocks with high uncertainty about risk, as measured by the volatility of expected volatility (vol-of-vol), robustly underperform stocks with low uncertainty about risk by 8% per year. This vol-of-vol effect is distinct from (combinations of) at least 20 previously documented return predictors, survives many robustness checks, and holds in the United States and across European stock markets. We empirically explore the pricing mechanism behind the vol-of-vol effect. The evidence points toward preference-based explanations and away from alternative explanations. Collectively, our results show that uncertainty about risk is highly relevant for stock prices.