Knowledge that Transforms

CEOs with large networks earn more than those with small networks. An additional connection to an executive or director outside the firm increases compensation by about $17,000 on average, more so for "important" members, such as CEOs of big firms. Pay-for-connectivity is unrelated to several measures of corporate governance, evidence in favor of an efficient contracting explanation for CEO pay.

This paper shows that during episodes of market turmoil, 13F institutional investors with short trading horizons sell their stockholdings to a larger extent than 13F institutional investors with longer trading horizons. This creates price pressure for stocks held mostly by short-horizon investors, which, as a consequence, experience larger price drops, and subsequent reversals, than stocks held mostly by long-horizon investors. These findings, obtained after controlling for the withdrawals experienced by the investors, are not driven by other institutional investors' and firms' characteristics. Overall, the evidence indicates that investors with short horizons amplify the effects of market-wide negative shocks by demanding liquidity at times when other potential buyers'capital is scarce.

We propose a theory of momentum and reversal based on flows between investment funds. Flows are triggered by changes in fund managers' efficiency, which investors either observe directly or infer from past performance. Momentum arises if flows exhibit inertia, and because rational prices underreact to expected future flows. Reversal arises because flows push prices away from fundamental values. Besides momentum and reversal, flows generate comovement, lead-lag effects, and amplification, with these being larger for high idiosyncratic risk assets. A calibration of our model using evidence on mutual fund returns and flows generates sizeable Sharpe ratios for momentum and value strategies.

AFA Meetings in Chicago for helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful for funding from the We demonstrate that a firm’s ability to innovate is predictable, persistent, and relatively simple to compute, and yet the stock market ignores the implications of past successes when valuing future innovation. We show that two firms that invest the exact same in research and development (R&D) can have quite divergent, but predictably divergent, future paths. Our approach is based on the simple premise that while future outcomes associated with R&D investment are uncertain, the past track records of firms may give insight into their potential for future success. We show that a long-short portfolio strategy that takes advantage of the information in past track records earns abnormal returns of roughly 11 percent per year. Importantly, these past track records also predict divergent future real outcomes in patents, patent citations, and new product innovations. Firms engage in a variety of activities. Some of these activities are straightforward, and easy to assess how they will impact firm value (e.g., maintenance capital expenditures). However, some of these activities, while crucially important for the discounted value of a

In September 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) temporarily banned most short sales in nearly 1,000 financial stocks. We examine the ban's effect on market quality, shorting activity, the aggressiveness of short sellers, and stock prices. The ban's effects are concentrated in larger stocks; there is little effect on firms in the lower half of the size distribution. Although shorting activity drops by about 77% in large-cap stocks, stock prices appear unaffected by the ban. All but the smallest quartile of firms subject to the ban suffer a severe degradation in market quality.

We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the financing costs faced by low-quality firms, so debt issuance of low-quality firms is particularly useful for forecasting bond returns. We show that a significant decline in issuer quality is a more reliable signal of credit market overheating than rapid aggregate credit growth. We use these findings to investigate the forces driving time variation in expected corporate bond returns.

We study whether and how family control affects valuation and corporate decisions during the 2008–2009 financial crisis using a sample of more than 8,500 firms from 35 countries. We find that family-controlled firms underperform significantly, they cut investment more relative to other firms, and these investment cuts are associated with greater underperformance. Further, we find that within family groups liquidity shocks are passed on through investment cuts across the group. Our evidence is consistent with families taking actions to increase the likelihood that the firms under their control and their control benefits survive the crisis, at the expense of outside shareholders.

We provide a model and empirical tests showing how an active acquisition market affects firm incentives to innovate and conduct R&D. Our model shows that small firms optimally may decide to innovate more when they can sell out to larger firms. Large firms may find it disadvantageous to engage in an “R&D race” with small firms, as they can obtain access to innovation through acquisition. Our model and evidence also show that the R&D responsiveness of firms increases with demand, competition, and industry merger and acquisition activity. All of these effects are stronger for smaller firms than for larger firms.

International audience

We use loan-level data to examine how large international banks reduced their cross-border lending after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Country, firm, and bank fixed effects allow us to disentangle credit supply and demand and to simultaneously control for the unobserved traits of banks and the countries and firms they lend to. We document substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which different banks retrenched from the same country. Banks reduced credit less to markets that were geographically close; where they were more experienced; where they operated a subsidiary; and where they were integrated into a network of domestic co-lenders.