Knowledge that Transforms

Stock returns are correlated with contemporaneous earnings growth, dividend growth, future real activity, and other cash-flow proxies. The correlation between cash-flow proxies and stock returns may arise from association of cash-flow proxies with one-period expected returns, cash-flow news, and/or expected-return news. We use Campbell's (1991) return decomposition to measure the relative importance of these three effects in regressions of returns on cash-flow proxies. In some of the popular specifications, variables that are motivated as proxies for cash-flow news also track a nontrivial proportion of one-period expected returns and expected-return news. As a result, the R-super-2 from a regression of returns on cash-flow proxies may overstate or understate the importance of cash-flow news as a source of return variance.

This article models, and experimentally simulates, the free-rider problem in a takeover when the raider has the option to “resolicit,” that is, to make a new offer after an offer has been rejected. In theory, the option to resolicit, by lowering offer credibility, increases the dissipative losses associated with free riding. The outcomes of our experiment support this prediction and produce losses from free riding even higher than theoretically predicted. These dissipation losses reduce raider gains to less than 3% of synergy value of the acquisition

We develop an equilibrium model in which exchange rates, stock prices and capital flows are jointly determined under incomplete forex risk trading. Incomplete hedging of forex risk, documented for U.S. global mutual funds, has three important implications: 1) exchange rates are almost as volatile as equity prices when the forex liquidity supply is not infinitely price elastic; 2) higher returns in the home equity market relative to the foreign equity market are associated with a home currency depreciation; 3) net equity flows into the foreign market are positively correlated with a foreign currency appreciation. The model predictions are strongly supported at daily, monthly and quarterly frequencies for 17 OECD countries visà-vis the U.S. Moreover, correlations are strongest after 1990 and for countries with higher market capitalization relative to GDP, suggesting that the observed exchange rate dynamics is indeed related to equity market development. Deniz Igan provided outstanding research assistance. Thanks also to participants in the 2002 NBER IFM summer institute, the 2003 European summer symposium in finanical markets, the FX microstructure conference at the Stockholm Institute for Finance and in seminars at Columbia, Finance sur Seine (Paris), Georgetown, George Washington University, and the IMF. We are both very grateful to the IMF Research Department for its warm hospitality and its stimulating

Investment banks imitate other bank's innovative corporate securities and compete with the innovator to underwrite new issues. This article uses data of all the corporate offerings of equity-linked and derivative securities in the Securities Data Company (SDC) to estimate the issuer's demand of underwriting services provided by investment banks across different varieties of securities. It finds that the demand for the innovator's variety is larger than the imitators'. This demand advantage decreases with time and faster for securities that appear later in a sequence of innovations. Imitation becomes less attractive later in the sequence as information from earlier deals spills-over to all banks.

This article illustrates an incentive-aligning role of debt in the presence of optimal compensation contracts. Owing to information asymmetry, value-maximizing compensation contracts allow managerial rents following high investment outcomes. The manager has an incentive to increase these rents by choosing investments that generate greater information asymmetry. An aptly chosen debt level mitigates this incentive, because investments that generate greater information asymmetry have more volatile outcomes. The greater volatility would make the debt risky, causing the shareholders to focus on high outcomes and therefore compensation contracts that reduce managerial rents. At the optimum, the manager avoids opportunistic investments, and the shareholders offer value-maximizing compensation contracts. Empirically, the analysis predicts a negative relationship between leverage and market-to-book that is reversed at extreme market-to-book ratios, a negative relationship between leverage and profitability, a negative relationship between leverage and pay-for-performance, and a positive relationship between pay-for-performance and investment opportunities.

We analyze a financially distressed owner-managed project. The main results of the model are: (1) borrower default is an endogenous response to the anticipated restructuring–foreclosure outcome; (2) the lender’s restructuring–foreclosure decision depends critically on the interaction between project value and industry liquidity; and (3) the lender waits for the industry to recapitalize before selling assets obtained through foreclosure. Empirical analysis of a large sample of defaulted commercial real estate loans supports many of the model predictions, including restructuring–foreclosure outcomes that are consistent with endogenous borrower default and firesale discounts that vary depending on industry market conditions at the time of foreclosure.

This article shows how the market coskewness model of Rubinstein (1973) and Kraus and Litzenberger (1976) is altered when a nonredundant call option is optimally traded. Owing to the option’s nonredundancy, the economy’s stochastic discount factor (SDF) depends not only on the market return and the square of the market return but also on the option return, the square of the option return, and the product of the market and option returns. This leads to an asset pricing model in which the expected return on any risky asset depends explicitly on the asset’s coskewness with option returns. The empirical results show that the option coskewness model outperforms several competing benchmark models. Furthermore, option coskewness captures some of the same risks as the Fama–French factors small minus big (SMB) and high minus low (HML). These results suggest that the factors that drive the pricing of nonredundant options are also important for pricing risky equities.

We derive a closed-form solution for the optimal portfolio of a nonmyopic utility maximizer who has incomplete information about the alphas or abnormal returns of risky securities. We show that the hedging component induced by learning about the expected return can be a substantial part of the demand. Using our methodology, we perform an “ex ante” empirical exercise, which shows that the utility gains resulting from optimal allocation are substantial in general, especially for long horizons, and an “ex post” empirical exercise, which shows that analysts’ recommendations are not very useful.

When a loan is sold, it goes to a lower-cost financing source than its originator. Yet, lending markets are less than perfectly competitive. Despite the lower funding cost, therefore, the loan price is not necessarily more favorable to the borrower. However, corporate borrowers are averse to the participation of their loans to other lenders because of the complexity of dealing with multiple banks and the potential information costs of the sale announcement. Consequently, I conjecture that the borrower extracts a price concession in exchange for allowing the bank to sell participations in the loan. Using a hand-matched dataset of loans, borrowers, and lenders, I find that the average yield spread on loans originated by active loan sellers is about 20 basis points lower than the average spread on loans originated by moderate loan sellers.

The evidence in Fama and Bliss (1987) that forward interest rates forecast future spot interest rates for horizons beyond a year repeats in the out-of-sample 1986--2004 period. But the inference that this forecast power is due to mean reversion of the spot rate toward a constant expected value no longer seems valid. Instead, the predictability of the spot rate captured by forward rates seems to be due to mean reversion toward a time-varying expected value that is subject to a sequence of apparently permanent shocks that are on balance positive to mid-1981 and on balance negative thereafter.