Knowledge that Transforms

[As an alternative to the pecking order, we develop a dynamic calibratable model where the firm avoids mispricing via signaling. The model is rich, featuring endogenous investment, debt, default, dividends, equity flotations, and share repurchases. In equilibrium, firms with negative private information have negative leverage, issue equity, and overinvest. Firms signal positive information by substituting debt for equity. Default costs induce such firms to underinvest. Model simulations reveal that repeated signaling can account for countercyclical leverage, leverage persistence, volatile procylical investment, and correlation between size and leverage. The model generates other novel predictions. Investment rates are the key predictor of abnormal announcement returns in simulated data, with leverage only predicting returns unconditionally. Firms facing asymmetric information actually exhibit higher mean Q ratios and investment rates.]

[We test the prediction of recent theories that stocks with high idiosyncratic skewness should have low expected returns. Because lagged skewness alone does not adequately forecast skewness, we estimate a cross-sectional model of expected skewness that uses additional predictive variables. Consistent with recent theories, we find that expected idiosyncratic skewness and returns are negatively correlated. Specifically, the Fama-French alpha of a low-expected-skewness quintile exceeds the alpha of a high-expected-skewness quintile by 1.00% per month. Furthermore, the coefficients on expected skewness in Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions are negative and significant. In addition, we find that expected skewness helps explain the phenomenon that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility have low expected returns.]

[In the process of lending to a firm, a bank acquires proprietary firm-specific information that is unavailable to nonlenders. This asymmetric evolution of information between lenders and prospective lenders grants the former an information monopoly. This article empirically investigates whether relationship banks exploit this advantage by charging higher interest rates than those that would prevail were all banks symmetrically informed. My identification strategy hinges on the notion that large information shocks that level the playing field among banks erode the relationship bank's information monopoly. I use the borrower's initial public offering (IPO) as such an information-releasing event, and build a panel dataset in which the unit of observation is a firm's lending relationships before and after its IPO. Prior to a firm's IPO, I find a U-shaped relation between borrowing rates and relationship intensity. After the IPO, interest rates are decreasing in relationship intensity. Furthermore, mean interest rates drop after an IPO. The results are robust to firm and loan-year fixed effects, and to controls for firm leverage pre-and post-IPO. Thus, the reported interest rate pattern is clean of any confounding effects that might arise from changes in financial risk.]

[This article studies optimal mortgage design in a continuous-time setting with volatile and privately observable income, costly foreclosure, and a stochastic market interest rate. We show that the features of the optimal mortgage are consistent with an option adjustable-rate mortgage (option ARM). Under the optimal contract, the borrower is given discretion of how much to repay until his balance reaches a certain limit. The default rates and interest rate payment on the mortgage correlate positively with the market interest rate. Gains from using the optimal contract relative to simpler mortgages are the biggest for those who face more income variability, buy pricey houses given their income level, or make little or no down payment. Our model thus may help to explain a high concentration of option ARMs among riskier borrowers.]

[We examine how residents of the United States allocate their stock portfolios internationally. We find that a large U.S. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) position in a destination country in 1990 is associated with a relatively large stock portfolio position in that country in the 2001-2006 period. Moreover, a change in the U.S. FDI position from 1980 to 1990 helps predict the change in the U.S. Foreign Portfolio Investment position from 1994 to 2006. These results are rationalized by Van Nieuwerburgh and Veldkamp's (2009) equilibrium model of learning and portfolio choice under an information processing constraint. FDI establishes marginal differences in the endowments of information about different countries, which later translate into differences in stock portfolio holdings. We control for cross-country differences in capital controls, proximity along different dimensions, corporate governance, and economic and capital market development. Our results also hold for the G6 countries collectively.]

[We develop a new solution method for a broad class of discrete-time dynamic portfolio choice problems. The method efficiently approximates conditional expectations of the value function by using (i) a decomposition of the state variables into a component observable by the investor and a stochastic deviation; and (ii) a Taylor expansion of the value function. We illustrate the accuracy of the method in handling several realistic features of portfolio choice problems such as intermediate consumption, multiple assets, multiple state variables, portfolio constraints, non-time-separable preferences, and nonredundant endogenous state variables. We finally use the method to solve a realistic large-scale life-cycle portfolio choice and consumption problem with predictable expected returns and recursive preferences.]

[We find a positive cross-sectional relationship between expected stock returns and default risk, contrary to the negative relationship estimated by prior studies. Whereas prior studies use noisy ex post realized returns to estimate expected returns, we use ex ante estimates based on the implied cost of capital. The results suggest that investors expected higher returns for bearing default risk, but they were negatively surprised by lower-than-expected returns on high default risk stocks in the 1980s. We also extend the sample compared with prior studies and find that the evidence based on realized returns is considerably weaker in the 1952-1980 period.]

[Valuations of entrepreneurial companies are only observed occasionally, albeit more frequently for well-performing companies. Consequently, estimators of risk and return must correct for sample selection to obtain consistent estimates. We develop a general model of dynamic sample selection and estimate it using data from venture capital investments in entrepreneurial companies. Our selection correction leads to markedly lower intercepts and higher estimates of risks compared to previous studies. The methodology is generally applicable to estimating risk and return in illiquid markets with endogenous trading.]

[We use Monte Carlo simulations and real data to assess the performance of methods dealing with measurement error in investment equations. Our experiments show that fixed effects, error heteroscedasticity, and flata skewness severely affect the performance and reliability of methods found in the literature. Estimators that use higher-order moments return biased coefficients for (both) mismeasured and perfectly measured regressors. These estimators are also very inefficient. Instrumental-variable-type estimators are more robust and efficient, although they require restrictive assumptions. We estimate empirical investment models using alternative methods. Real-world investment data contain firm-fixed effects and heteroscedasticity, causing high-order moments estimators to deliver coefficients that are unstable and not economically meaningful. Instrumental variables methods yield estimates that are robust and conform to theoretical priors. Our analysis provides guidance for dealing with measurement errors under circumstances researchers are likely to find in practice.]

[We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new dataset of top officers of large firms from 1936 to 2005. The median real value of compensation was remarkably flat from the late 1940s to the 1970s, revealing a weak relationship between pay and aggregate firm growth. By contrast, this correlation was much stronger in the past thirty years. This historical perspective also suggests that compensation arrangements have often helped to align managerial incentives with those of shareholders because executive wealth was sensitive to firm performance for most of our sample. These new facts pose a challenge to several common explanations for the rise in executive pay since the 1980s.]