Knowledge that Transforms

We examine an adverse selection model of trading in which both informed and uninformed traders are rational, maximizing agents. Replacing the price inelastic “noise” or “liquidity” traders with strategic, utility-maximizing hedgers permits an explicit analysis of the uninformed traders’ welfare, and demonstrates that several comparative statics obtained from the standard paradigm of Kyle (1984, 1985) are altered significantly upon endogenizing the trading motives of these agents. In contrast to extant models, market liquidity and price efficiency are both nonmonotonic in the number of uninformed hedgers in the market. Also, the welfare of hedgers monotonically decreases with the number of informed traders, despite greater competition between the informed.

While the theoretical relation between taxes and capital structure has been extensively analyzed, the empirical evidence on this issue has thus far been inconclusive. One of the main difficulties confronting previous empirical studies of the cross-sectional relationship between taxes and leverage was the control of intervening variables. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA), which drastically changed the tax regime, provides a unique opportunity to assess the interaction between taxes and leverage decisions in a controlled environment. We test the relationship between leverage and certain tax-related variables for a large sample of companies in the years surrounding the enactment of the TRA. The results support the tax-based theories of capital structure. The findings indicate that there exists a substitution effect between debt and nondebt tax shields, and that both corporate and personal tax rates affect leverage decisions.

We formally examine the role of litigation risk in initial public offering (IPO) pricing. The underwriter's pricing decision trades off current revenue against expected future litigation costs, both of which are increasing in the IPO price. Given a time-consistency constraint and rational expectations on the part of investors, however, the "standard" litigation risk argument does not lead to equilibrium underpricing. We develop a richer model that provides sufficient conditions under which there is equilibrium underpricing. The issuer's choice of employing an underwriter versus floating the IPO on its own is examined, and various testable implications of the model are developed. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

When the market can observe the profitability of all projects with equal precision, then with stock compensation (1) the weight on any given project in managerial compensation is independent of the marginal productivity of effort in the project; (2) the projects that are the noisiest indicators of managerial effort receive the most weight in compensation; and (3) investors have the greatest incentive to collect information about projects that are the noisiest indicators of managerial effort. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

A model of the nominal term structure of interest rates is developed that has a positive and stationary process for the interest rate and delivers closed-form expressions for the prices of discount bonds and European options on bonds. Unlike the one-state-variable version of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) model, this model—even in its one-state-variable version—allows the term premium to change sign as a function of the state and the term to maturity, and also allows for shapes of the yield curve that are observed in the U.S. data but that are disallowed in the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross model

The continuous-time version of Kyle’s (1985) model of asset pricing with asymmetric information is studied. It is shown that there is a unique equilibrium pricing rule within a certain class. This pricing rule is obtained in closed form for general distributions of the asset value. A particular example is a lognormal distribution, for which the equilibrium price process is a geometric Brownian motion. General trading strategies are allowed. In equilibrium, the informed agent, who is risk neutral, has many optima, but he does not correlate his trades locally with the noise trades nor does he submit discrete orders.

Asset pricing theory is presented with representative-agent utility given by a stochastic differential formulation of recursive utility. Asset returns are characterized from general first-order conditions of the Hamilton–Bellman–Jacobi equation for optimal control. Homothetic representative-agent recursive utility functions are shown to imply that excess expected rates of return on securities are given by a linear combination of the continuous-time market-portfolio-based capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the consumption-based CAPM. The Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross characterization of the term structure is examined with a recursive generalization, showing the response of the term structure to variations in risk aversion. Also, a new multicommodity factor-return model, as well as an extension of the “usual” discounted expected value formula for asset prices, is introduced.

The author reports a bound on the variance of price-dividend ratios and a decomposition of their variance into terms that reflect changes in dividend growth and discount rates. The specification is not restrictive. The test statistics do not require construction of ex post present values; instead, they are restrictions on means, variances, and covariances of price-dividend ratios, dividend growth, and discount rates. He considers implications for the mean price-dividend ratio, and he evaluates whether a low mean discount rate can rationalize the mean and variance of price-dividend ratios. The results do not indicate any striking rejections of present-value models. However, the bulk of the variance of price-dividend ratios must be accounted for by changing forecasts of discount rates, and discount rates must possess some unusual characteristics. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

I examine the uniformity of risk pricing in futures and asset markets. Tests against a general alternative do not reject complete integration of futures and asset markets. As predicted, estimates of the “zero-beta” rate for futures are close to zero, and premiums for systematic risk do not differ significantly across assets and futures. There is, however, evidence consistent with a specific alternative model presented by Hirshleifer (1988). Returns in foreign currency and agricultural futures vary with the net holdings of hedgers, after controlling for systematic risk. These results imply a degree of market segmentation and support hedging pressure as a determinant of futures premiums.

We show that the incentive for managers to build their reputations distorts firms’ investment policies in favor of relatively safe projects, thereby aligning managers’ interests with those of bondholders, even though managers are hired and fired by shareholders. This effect opposes the familiar agency problem of risky debt that is imperfectly covenant-protected, wherein shareholders are tempted to favor excessively risky projects in order to expropriate bondholders. Consequently, when managerial concern for reputation results in conservatism, it can actually make shareholders better off ex ante by allowing the firm to issue more debt. We examine how the optimal choice of leverage from the shareholders’ standpoint is influenced by takeover activity, and how the adoption of antitakeover measures affects a firm’s investment policy and leverage choice.