Knowledge that Transforms

[In this paper we examine the effects of capital gains taxation on firms' investment and financing decisions. We develop a real-options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm's capital structure are endogenously and jointly determined. Our analysis demonstrates that the asymmetric taxation of capital gains and losses fosters investment by eroding the option value of waiting. It also shows that firms controlled by taxable investors employ more equity financing, the higher the firm's stock price and the worse the firm's historical performance. Using a large sample of U.S. industrial firms that are owned by taxable investors between 1970 and 2008, we present new evidence on corporate investment and financing policies, which is supportive of the model's predictions.]

[This article examines information and incentive problems that can exist in the market for commercial mortgages that are pooled and repackaged as commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBSs). We find that mortgages that are originated by institutions with large negative stock returns in the quarters prior to the origination date tend to have higher credit spreads and default more than other mortgages with similar observable characteristics. Properties financed with these mortgages also exhibit weaker post-securitization operating performance. In addition, stock price loser institutions are anxious to securitize mortgages they originate more quickly. Finally we find that credit rating agencies require higher levels of subordination for CMBS pools (i.e., view these pools as riskier) that include more mortgages originated by underperforming originators. This evidence is consistent with reputation models in which poorly performing originators have less incentive to carefully evaluate the credit quality of prospective borrowers, thereby letting relatively riskier mortgages pass through their weaker screening standards.]

[Previous studies report that cash holdings are more valuable for financially constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. We examine (i) why this is so and (ii) why some constrained firms appear to hold too little cash. Our results indicate that greater cash holdings are associated with higher levels of investment for constrained firms with high hedging needs and that the association between investment and value is stronger for constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. These findings imply that higher cash holdings allow constrained firms to undertake value-increasing projects that might otherwise be bypassed. We further find that some constrained firms exhibit low cash holdings because of persistently low cash flows. Overall, our findings support the view that greater cash holdings of constrained firms are a value-increasing response to costly external financing.]

[Welch and Goyal (2008) find that numerous economic variables with in-sample predictive ability for the equity premium fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecasting gains relative to the historical average. Arguing that model uncertainty and instability seriously impair the forecasting ability of individual predictive regression models, we recommend combining individual forecasts. Combining delivers statistically and economically significant out-of-sample gains relative to the historical average consistently over time. We provide two empirical explanations for the benefits of forecast combination: (i) combining forecasts incorporates information from numerous economic variables while substantially reducing forecast volatility; (ii) combination forecasts are linked to the real economy.]

[In this article, we use a large sample of transaction-level institutional trading data to analyze the role of institutional investors in initial public offerings (IPOs). The theoretical literature on IPOs has long argued that institutional investors possess private information about IPOs and that underpricing is a mechanism for compensating them to reveal this private information. We study whether institutions indeed have private information about IPOs, retain their information advantage in post-IPO trading, and are able to realize significant profits from their participation in IPOs. We also study institutional IPO allocations and allocation sales to analyze whether institutions play an important role in supporting IPOs in the aftermarket and are rewarded by underwriters for playing such a role. We find that institutions sell 70.2% of their IPO allocations in the first year, fully realize the "money left on the table," and do not dissipate these profits in post-IPO trading. Further, institutions hold allocations in IPOs with weaker post-issue demand for a longer period, and they are rewarded for this by underwriters with more IPO allocations. Finally, institutional trading has predictive power for long-run IPO performance, especially in IPOs in which they received allocations; however, this predictive power decays over time. Overall, our results suggest that institutional investors possess significant private information about IPOs, play an important supportive role in the IPO aftermarket, and receive considerable compensation for their participation in IPOs.]

[Using a novel dataset that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms, we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation. Relative to high-credit-quality firms, lowcredit-quality firms are more likely to have a multi-tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non-bank debt with loose covenants. We discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts.]

[This article documents differences between the Q-sensitivity of investment of stand-alone firms and unrelated segments of conglomerate firms. Unrelated segments exhibit lower Q-sensitivity of investment than stand-alone firms. This fact is driven by unrelated segments of conglomerate firms that tend to invest less than stand-alone firms in high-Q industries. This finding is robust to matching on industry, year, size, age, and profitability. The differences are more pronounced in conglomerates in which top management has small ownership stakes, suggesting that agency problems explain the investment behavior of conglomerates.]

[This article develops and implements a new test to investigate whether sell-side analysts herd around the consensus when they make stock recommendations. Our empirical results support the herding hypothesis. Stock price reactions following recommendation revisions are stronger when the new recommendation is away from the consensus than when it is closer to it, indicating that the market recognizes analysts' tendency to herd. We find that analysts from larger brokerages, analysts following stocks with smaller dispersion across recommendations, and analysts who make less frequent revisions are more likely to herd.]

[The empirical evidence on the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic risk and expected stock returns is mixed. We demonstrate that the omission of the previous month's stock returns can lead to a negatively biased estimate of the relation. The magnitude of the omitted variable bias depends on the approach to estimating the conditional idiosyncratic volatility. Although a negative relation exists when the estimate is based on daily returns, it disappears after return reversals are controlled for. Return reversals can explain both the negative relation between value-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic volatility and the insignificant relation between equal-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic volatility. In contrast, there is a significantly positive relation between the conditional idiosyncratic volatility estimated from monthly data and expected returns. This relation remains robust after controlling for return reversals.]

[When a developed-country multinational firm acquires majority control of a firm in an emerging market, there is an economically large and statistically significant increase in the acquiring firm's stock price. In 1986-2006, developed-market acquirers experienced positive and significant abnormal returns of 1.16%, on average, over a three-day event window. Positive acquirer returns and dollar value gains appear unique to emerging-market mergers and acquisitions and are not replicated when the same developed-market acquirers take over firms in developed markets. The size of the stock price increase is more pronounced (a) the weaker the contracting environment in the emerging market and (b) for industries with high asset intangibility.]