Despite the size and importance of separately managed accounts (SMAs) and collective investment trusts, their characteristics and performance have not been studied in detail. We show that separate account performance is similar to that of index funds and superior to that of actively managed mutual funds. Management supplies a benchmark for each separate account. When the management-selected benchmark is used to measure performance, performance is significantly overstated. Despite this, investors react to differences in performance from the management-preferred benchmark in choosing among SMAs. Finally we find variables that explain both the cross section of alphas and the cross section of cash flows.

Benchmarking, pay for luck, and the large compensation packages given to CEOs in recent years are three major controversial compensation practices. We examine the extent to which variation in the market for CEO talent explains these practices. We find that CEO compensation is benchmarked against other firms only in industries where CEO talent is not firm-specific, and that pay for luck is more prevalent there also. These findings are consistent with theories based on the market for CEO talent. However, CEO compensation levels do not depend on whether CEO talent is firm-specific, which seems inconsistent with the talent competition argument.

We empirically analyze the prevalence and economic underpinnings of closing price manipulation and its detection. We estimate that ∼1% of closing prices are manipulated, of which only a small fraction is detected and prosecuted. We find that stocks with high levels of information asymmetry and mid to low levels of liquidity are most likely to be manipulated. A significant proportion of manipulation occurs on month/quarter-end days. Manipulation on these days is more likely in stocks with high levels of institutional ownership. Government regulatory budget has a strong effect on both manipulation and detection.

We show that lenders make price concessions for the right to resell loans and reveal a strong countervailing association between the ex ante probability of loan resale and the initial loan spreads. We disentangle the side effects (reduced monitoring) from the benefits (enhanced liquidity) brought by the secondary loan resales. The average net impact of simultaneously reducing the probability of the presence of resale constraint and raising the probability of resale across the full sample is to lower spreads by 14 basis points. On balance, the secondary loan market provides clear benefits to the issuers of debt.

We evaluate US firms’ leverage determinants by studying how firms paid for 2,073 very large investments between 1989 and 2006. This approach complements existing empirical work on capital structure, which typically estimates regression models of leverage for a broad set of firms. Because large investments are mostly externally financed, security issuances should provide information about managers’ attitudes toward leverage. We find that issued securities move firms toward target debt ratios. Firms also tend to issue more equity following a share price run-up, consistent with both the tradeoff hypothesis and managerial efforts to time market sentiment. We find little support for the standard pecking order hypothesis.