Knowledge that Transforms

Abstract Principal customers have strong incentives to screen and/or monitor suppliers to ensure supply-chain stability; consequently, the implicit certification from the existence of long-term relationships with principal customers has reputational consequences that potentially spill over to other markets. We argue that one such consequence is smaller loan spreads and looser loan covenants on bank loans, as firms that are able to hold on to principal customers longer are perceived as safer firms by banks. We address causality and endogeneity issues via a variety of tests and find consistent results. Our study suggests that non-financial stakeholders can have important effects on the decisions of financial stakeholders.

Abstract This article examines whether foreign investor heterogeneity plays a role in stock liquidity in a sample of 27,828 firms from thirty-nine countries worldwide. Foreign direct ownership is negatively associated with stock liquidity, while foreign portfolio ownership is positively associated with stock liquidity. Consistent with theoretical predictions, foreign ownership explains stock liquidity through both trading activity and information channels. The value-enhancing benefits of foreign direct investors’ monitoring efforts outweigh their liquidity costs and high adverse selection premium. However, the positive impact of foreign portfolio ownership on firm performance becomes negative and is not robustly significant after controlling for liquidity.

Abstract We document that defined benefit pension plans with significant holdings in private equity (PE) earn substantially greater returns than plans with small holdings, in both the 1990s and the 2000s. A one standard deviation increase in PE holdings is associated with 4% greater returns per year. Up to one-third of this outperformance comes from lower costs that we link to economizing on costly intermediation by avoiding fund-of-funds and investing directly. The bulk of the outperformance comes from superior gross returns only partially explained by access and experience. We conjecture that larger PE investors have superior due diligence and ability to bridge information asymmetries in PE.

Abstract The Lehman bankruptcy highlights the potential for interconnectedness to cause negative externalities through counterparty contagion, but the externalities may also arise from information contagion. We examine troubled financial firms and find that both channels are significant factors in creating spillover effects. Counterparty contagion is greater in cases of riskier firms and larger and more complex exposures. However, the counterparty exposures are small, especially among banks that face diversification regulations, and do not typically cause a cascade of failures. Information contagion is stronger for rivals in the same markets and has a larger impact in cases of distress than in bankruptcies.

Abstract Event studies are a common research method in finance and management research. This note argues that the validity of inferences based on announcement effects hinges critically on controls for confounding events and appropriate statistical tests. We present a unique case where data is available for a replication of two key event studies. Specifically, we examine and show the importance of systematic confounding information on findings of the effect of corporate name changes on stock market reactions. We demonstrate that systematic confounding events are critical challenges when testing theories about investors’ reactions in finance and management research.

We study the interaction between relationship banking and short-term arm’s length activities of banks, called trading. We show that a bank can use the franchise value of its relationships to expand the scale of trading, but may allocate too much capital to trading ex post, compromising its ability to build relationships ex ante. This effect is reinforced when trading is used for risk shifting. Overall, combining relationship banking and trading offers benefits under small-scale trading, but distortions may dominate when trading is unbridled. This suggests that trading by banks, while benign historically, might be distortive with deeper financial markets.

Abstract This study presents novel, robust evidence on the effect of price impact of trading, or Kyle’s lambda, on activist hedge funds’ predisclosure ownership accumulations. 1 We find that hedge fund investors are less likely to target illiquid firms; upon targeting an illiquid firm, activists choose private transactions to limit the price impact of their trades; upon doing open market transactions, the activist investors buy more shares of those firms with liquid stock. Our study suggests that market impact can be a factor with significant implications for shareholder activism, and more generally, corporate governance.

Abstract We use an arbitrage-free term structure model with spanned stochastic volatility to determine the value of the deflation protection option embedded in Treasury inflation-protected securities. The model accurately prices the deflation protection option prior to the financial crisis when its value was near zero; at the peak of the crisis in late 2008 when deflationary concerns spiked sharply; and in the post-crisis period. During 2009, the average value of this option at the 5-year maturity was 41 basis points on a par-yield basis. The option value is shown to be closely linked to overall market uncertainty as measured by the VIX, especially during and after the 2008 financial crisis.

Abstract We exploit the impact of hurricane Katrina on insurance companies to study the relationship between bondholder concentration and credit risk. Redemption-driven sales by property and casualty (re)insurance companies exposed to hurricane Katrina are associated with a large drop in bondholder concentration faced by corporate bond issuers. Exploiting this shock to capture exogenous variation in bondholder concentration, we find that greater bondholder concentration is associated with higher bond yield spreads, as well as with firm characteristics associated with credit risk.

This article discusses the optimal leverage ratio and capital requirements when asymmetric information exists between the bank and the regulator. We show that the optimal requirements take different forms in the short and long run. In either case, imposing the risk-weighted capital requirement without considering the incentives of the bank to misreport its risk profile is never optimal by itself. In the long run, the optimal requirements take the form of a leverage ratio requirement on top of the risk-weighted capital requirement. The add-on leverage ratio requirement, which serves as a compensation for the limited supervisory power of the regulators, should be set such that the risk-taking behavior of the bank is unchanged from the situation in which the regulator uses the risk-weighted capital requirement alone, and the misreporting incentive of the bank is eliminated by the add-on leverage ratio requirement.