Knowledge that Transforms

We document differences in human-capital deployment between diversified and focused firms. We find that diversified firms have higher labor productivity and that they redeploy labor to industries with better prospects in response to changing opportunities. The opportunities and incentives provided in internal labor markets in turn affect the development of workers' human capital. We find that workers more frequently transition to other industries in which their diversified firms operate and with smaller wage losses compared with workers in the open market, even when they leave their original firms. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.

We investigate whether and how an exogenous and unprecedented improvement in non-U.S. firms' financial-reporting quality affects post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We find that PEAD declines after the information shock, and this decrease is more pronounced for firms with fewer concurrent earnings announcements, greater institutional holdings, and lower limits to arbitrage. In addition, the decrease in PEAD is driven by firms with greater changes in financial reporting, an increase in analyst forecast accuracy and institutional ownership, and a decrease in limits to arbitrage. These findings support the mispricing explanation of PEAD, in particular the limited attention hypothesis, in an international setting.

We examine the effect of a permanent change to a country corporate income repatriation tax system on corporate financial policies. In 2009, Japan and the United Kingdom switched from a worldwide system to a territorial system for the taxation of repatriated foreign earnings, effectively reducing the tax liabilities of most multinational firms when repatriating earnings. We find that after the change firms accumulate less cash, pay out larger amounts through dividends and share repurchases, and invest less abroad. We do not find that the tax system change has significantly affected domestic investments even when controlling for capital constraints.

Has the academic review process become excessive? In a setting where editors cannot distinguish significant flaws from mere blemishes, reviewers recommend the repair of blemishes in order to acquire reputations for high skill. In equilibrium, editors accede to reviewer insistence upon such cosmetic surgery. If blemishes are sometimes unremovable, demands for repair sometimes block good papers from publication. This implies a social value to active editing. Reviewer signal-jamming may especially suppress innovative research and research designed to verify others' findings. This perspective strongly suggests that the growth of the review process is harmful. I therefore offer tentative proposals for reform.

Opening the capital account allows financially constrained firms to raise capital from abroad. Since capital and skilled labor are relative complements, this increases the relative demand for skilled labor versus unskilled labor, leading to higher wage inequality. Using aggregate data and exploiting variation in the timing of capital account openings across 20 mainly European countries, I find that opening the capital account increases aggregate wage inequality. In order to identify the mechanism, I use sectoral data and exploit variation in external financial dependence and capital-skill complementarity across industries. I find that capital account opening increases sectoral wage inequality, particularly in industries with both high financial needs and strong complementarity.

We develop a dynamic model of investment, financing, and cash management decisions in which investment is lumpy and firms face capital supply uncertainty. We characterize optimal policies explicitly, demonstrate that smooth-pasting conditions may not guarantee optimality, and show that firms may not follow standard single barrier policies. In the model, firms with high investment costs differ in their behaviors from firms with low investment costs, financing policy does not follow a strict pecking order, and the optimal payout policy may feature several regions with both incremental and lumpy dividend payments.

We develop a strategic trading model in which an insider exploits noise traders' overreaction. A feedback effect arises from the insider's trading on fundamental information (the expected growth rate of dividends) and nonfundamental information (insider's inventory or noise supply). We find that the stock price is not fully revealing; a faster mean-reverting noise supply leads to a more volatile price; the price impact can increase with insider's risk-aversion; and a risk-averse insider can trade more aggressively on fundamental information than a risk-neutral one does. Insider's current trade and his previous inventory exhibit simultaneously positive forecasting powers for future stock returns.

The paper proposes a self-exciting asset pricing model that takes into account co-jumps between prices and volatility and self-exciting jump clustering. We employ a Bayesian learning approach to implement real-time sequential analysis. We find evidence of self-exciting jump clustering since the 1987 market crash, and its importance becomes more obvious at the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis. We also find that learning affects the tail behaviors of the return distributions and has important implications for risk management, volatility forecasting, and option pricing.

We investigate, in a theoretical framework, the joint role played by investors' attention to news and learning uncertainty in determining asset prices. The model provides two main predictions. First, stock return variance and risk premia increase with both attention and uncertainty. Second, this increasing relationship is quadratic. We empirically test these two predictions, and we show that the data lend support to the increasing relationship. The evidence for a quadratic relationship is mixed. Overall, our study shows theoretically and empirically that both attention and uncertainty are key determinants of asset prices.

We examine a novel, but economically important, characterization of trade credit relationships in which large investment-grade buyers borrow from their smaller suppliers. Using a matched sample of large retail buyers and their much smaller suppliers, we find that slower payment terms by large retailers are associated with lower investment at the supplier level. The effects are sharpest during periods of tight bank credit and for firms which we might otherwise characterize as financially constrained. The opportunity cost of extending credit to large buyers appears to be positive and sharply increasing in the financial frictions facing a firm.