We exploit an exogenous change in basis risk in the oil and gas industry to analyze the channels through which hedging affects firm value. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that firms affected by a basis risk shock reduce investment, have lower valuations, sell assets, and reduce debt. Our findings are driven by firms with ex ante high leverage. Overall, our results provide evidence that reducing the probability of financial distress and underinvestment risk are first-order channels through which hedging affects firm value. Received October 5, 2015; editorial decision December 22, 2016 by Editor David Denis.

Corporations uniquely have a tax preference for cash dividends. Nevertheless, dividends do not increase following trades of large-percentage blocks of stock from individuals to corporations. Moreover, although one-third of firms have corporate blockholders, 68% of these firms pay no dividends, and ownership is not clustered at levels that increase the tax benefits of dividends. These findings are not driven by the investing firms' tax rates or by agency problems. Instead, operating companies expand the target firms and pursue joint ventures. Dividends are lower with these investors. Financial investors are not attracted to dividend-paying firms and tend to be passive. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

Hedge funds have become important investors in public companies raising equity privately. Hedge funds tend to finance companies that have poor fundamentals and pronounced information asymmetries. To compensate for these shortcomings, hedge funds protect themselves by requiring substantial discounts, negotiating repricing rights, and entering into short positions of the underlying stocks. We find that companies that obtain financing from hedge funds significantly underperform companies that obtain financing from other investors during the following two years. We argue that hedge funds are investors of last resort and provide funding for companies that are otherwise constrained from raising equity capital. (JELG14, G23, G32) Hedge funds have recently become an important source of funding for pub-lic companies raising equity privately. Financing young companies with severe information asymmetries is an important investment strategy for some hedge funds. Since 1995, hedge funds have participated in more than 50 % of the private placements of equity securities and have contributed

We consider asset pricing models in which the SDF can be factorized into an observable component and a potentially unobservable one. Using a relative entropy minimization approach, we nonparametrically estimate the SDF and its components. Empirically, we find the SDF has a business-cycle pattern and significant correlations with market crashes and the Fama-French factors. Moreover, we derive novel bounds for the SDF that are tighter and have higher information content than existing ones. We show that commonly used consumption-based SDFs correlate poorly with the estimated one, require high risk aversion to satisfy the bounds and understate market crash risk. (

This study examines stock return predictability via lagged financial variables with unknown stochastic properties. We propose a novel testing procedure that (1) robustifies inference to regressors' degree of persistence, (2) accommodates testing the joint predictive ability of financial variables in multiple regression, (3) is easy to implement as it is based on a linear estimation procedure, and (4) can be used for long-horizon predictability tests. We provide some evidence in favor of short-horizon predictability during the 1927-2012 period. Nevertheless, this evidence almost entirely disappears in the post–1952 period. Moreover, predictability becomes weaker, not stronger, as the predictive horizon increases.

We study how the human capital embedded in teams is affected by, and reallocated through, corporate bankruptcies. After a bankruptcy, U.S. inventors produce fewer and less impactful patents. Moreover, teams become less stable. Consequently, compared to inventors that rely less on teamwork, the performance of team inventors deteriorates more. These findings point to the loss of team-specific human capital as a cost of resource reallocation through bankruptcy. Acquisitions by industrial firms and joint mobility of inventors with past collaborations limit these losses, suggesting that the labor market and the market for corporate control help preserve team-specific human capital in bankruptcies.

This paper investigates financial attention using novel panel data on daily investor online account logins. We find support for selective attention to portfolio information. Account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines. Investors also pay less attention when the VIX volatility index is high. The level of attention and the attention/return correlation are strongly related to investor demographics (gender, age) and financial position (wealth, holdings). Using a new statistical decomposition, we show how aggregate and individual household trading are related to investor attention.

Using a sample of non-U.S. firms from 43 countries, we investigate whether laws and regulations as well as votes cast by U.S. institutional investors are consistent with an effective shareholder voting process. We find that laws and regulations allow for meaningful votes to be cast, as shareholder voting is both mandatory and binding for important elections. For votes cast, we find there is greater dissent voting when investors fear expropriation. Further, greater dissent voting is associated with higher director turnover and more M&A withdrawals. Our results suggest that shareholder voting is an effective mechanism for exercising governance around the world.