Knowledge that Transforms

The Market Microstructure Symposium in this issue of the Review of Financial Studies illustrates the diverse types of research being undertaken by scholars in this area of finance. The excitement and activity level reflect the overlap of a number of important ingredients, which in turn are helping to shape this subfield. The rational expectations paradigm provides a strong conceptual foundation for the theoretical analysis of problems. The development of the very powerful and tractable frameworks of Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), and Kyle (1985), and its extension by Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), has greatly spurred theoretical work in this area. In fact, the symposium includes the important extension of the Kyle framework to incorporate risk aversion in the Subrahmanyam (1991) article. The influence of these theoretical models of adverse selection has been enhanced by the broad recognition of the importance of adverse selection in actual security trading. The development of empirically tractable approaches for examining adverse selection [e.g., Glosten and Harris (1988)] has heightened the impact of the development of the theory. Admati (1991) provides a recent, more detailed overview of the theoretical literature on rational expectations and market microstructure.

Marketing costs are introduced into the security design environment outlined in Allen and Gale (1988). It is shown that splitting the firm’s cash flow between products enhances their investor appeal and reduces marketing costs. We also explain how the extremal product design in Allen and Gale is thereby avoided and how in simple cases, debt, equity, or warrants can be optimal. Furthermore, we illustrate in general terms how the optimal solution employs portfolios of option-type products, and we give an example of two optimal products that share profits in seven of eight states.

In this article, we consider the possibility that some liquidity traders preannounce the size of their orders, a practice that has come to be known as 'sunshine trading'. Two possible effects preannouncement might have on the equilibrium are examined. First, since it identifies certain trades as informationless, preannouncement changes the nature of any informational asymmetries in the market. Second, preannouncement can coordinate the supply and demand of liquidity in the market. We show that preannouncement typically reduces the trading costs of those who preannounce, but its effects on the trading costs and welfare of other traders are ambiguous. We also examine the implications of preannouncement for the distributions of prices and the amount of information that prices reveal.

A simple introduction to contingent claim valuation of risky assets in a discrete time, stochastic interest-rate economy is provided. Taking the term structure of interest rates as exogenous, closed-form solutions are derived for European options written on (i) Treasury bills, (ii) interest-rate forward contracts, (iii) interest-rate futures contracts, (iv) Treasury bonds, (v) interest-rate caps, (vi) stock options, (vii) equity forward contracts, (viii) equity futures contracts, (ix) Eurodollar liabilities, and (x) foreign exchange contracts.

We develop a model of the acquisition market in which the acquirer has a choice between two takeover mechanisms: mergers and tender offers. A merger is modeled as a bargaining game between the acquiring and target firms; whereas a tender offer is modeled as an auction in which bidders arrive sequentially and compete for the target. At any stage of the bargaining game the acquiring firm can stop negotiating and make a tender offer. In equilibrium, there is a unique level of synergy gains below which the acquiring firm makes only a merger attempt as it expects to lose in the competition resulting from a tender offer. For synergy gains above this level, tender offers can occur. However, to get tender offers, target shareholders must give their managers golden parachutes that give higher payoffs in tender offers than in mergers.

An attempt is made to explain how enforceability is achieved in international debt contracts. Each bank announces the policy of denying credit to borrowers who default and chooses to adhere to it to maintain its reputation of being a tough bank to discipline its other borrowers. Loans are made by syndicates of banks in order to make the penalty for default severe enough so borrowers would choose not to default voluntarily. The model predicts that the interest rate charged on loans is smaller for the larger borrowers. Also, for any given borrower, the interest rate may fall after each successive default.

With time-varying adverse selection in the market for new equity issues, firms will prefer to issue equity when the market is most informed about the quality of the firm. This implies that equity issues tend to follow credible information releases. In addition, if the asymmetry in information increases over time between information releases, the price drop at the announcement of an equity issue should increase in the time since the last information release. Using earnings releases as a proxy for informative events, we find evidence supporting these propositions.

An economy is analyzed in which agents first choose whether to acquire costly information about the return to a risky asset, and then choose demand functions that determine the allocation of assets. It is a well-known paradox that if agents are price-takers and prices are fully revealing, then an equilibrium with costly information acquisition does not exist. It is shown that if the price formation process is modeled explicitly and agents are not price-takers, then it is possible to have an equilibrium with fully revealing prices and costly information acquisition.

We survey the variance-bounds tests of asset-price volatility, stressing the econometric aspects of these tests. The first variance-bounds tests of the present-value relation reported apparently striking evidence of excess volatility of asset prices. The statistical significance of the results, however, was either marginal or, in the case of model-free tests, impossible to assess. Moreover, the tests were soon criticized for a number of biases. Various other tests of the present-value relations were later developed, avoiding in different degrees the econometric problems attending the first-generation tests also found excess volatility, though sometimes of borderline statistical significance. This finding of excess volatility is robust and is difficult to explain within the representative-consumer, frictionless-market model. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

We present a model in which some of the firm’s information (“news”) can be disclosed verifiably and some information (“type”) cannot, to show that some firms may voluntarily withhold good news and disclose bad news. We describe an equilibrium in which high-type firms withhold good news and disclose bad news, whereas low-type firms disclose good news and withhold bad news. Under some parameter values, this equilibrium exists when other more traditional equilibria are ruled out by standard equilibrium refinements. The model explains some otherwise anomalous empirical evidence concerning stock price reactions to disclosure, provides some new empirical predictions, and suggests that mandatory disclosure requirements may have the undesirable consequence of making it more difficult for firms to reveal information that cannot be disclosed credibly.