Knowledge that Transforms

In addition to borrowing from financial institutions, firms may be financed by their suppliers. Although there are many theories explaining why non-financial firms lend money, there are few comprehensive empirical tests of these theories. This paper attempts to fill the gap. We focus on a sample of small firms whose access to capital markets may be limited. We find evidence that firms use trade credit relatively more when credit from financial institutions is not available. Thus while short term trade credit may be routinely used to minimize transactions costs, medium term borrowing against trade credit is a form of financing of last resort. Suppliers lend to firms no one else lends to because they may have a comparative advantage in getting information about buyers cheaply, they have a better ability to liquidate goods, and they have a greater implicit equity stake in the firm's long term survival. We find some evidence consistent with the use of trade credit as a means of price discrimination. Finally, we find that firms with better access to credit from financial institutions offer more trade credit. This suggests that firms may intermediate between institutional creditors and other firms who have limited access to financial institutions.

A standard presumption of market microstructure models is that competition between risk-neutral market makers inevitably leads to price schedules that leave market makers zero expected profits conditional on the order flow. This article documents an important lack of robustness of this zero-profit result. In particular, we show that if traders can split orders between market makers, then market makers set less-competitive price schedules that earn them strictly positive profits and hence raise trading costs. Thus, this article can explain why somebody might willingly make a market for a stock when there are fixed costs to doing so. The analysis extends to a limit order book, which by its nature is split against incoming market orders: equilibrium limit order schedules necessarily yield those agents positive expected profits.

This article shows (1) how entry and exit of firms in a competitive industry affect the valuation of securities and optimal capital structure, and (2) how, given a trade-off between tax advantages and agency costs, a firm will optimally adjust its leverage level after it is set up. We derive simple pricing expressions for corporate debt in which the price elasticity of demand for industry output plays a crucial role. When a firm optimally adjusts its leverage over time, we show that total firm value comprises the value of discounted cash flows assuming fixed capital structure, plus a continuum of options for marginal increases in debt.

Recent studies show that when a regression model is used to forecast stock and bond returns, the sample R^2 increases dramatically with the length of the return horizon. These studies argue, therefore, that long-horizon returns are highly predictable. This article presents evidence that suggests otherwise. Long-horizon regressions can easily yield large values of the sample R^2, even if the populations R^2 is smaller or zero. Moreover, long-horizon regressions with a small or zero population R^2 can produce t-ratios that might be interpreted as evidence of strong predictability. In general, the analysis provides little support for the view that long-horizon returns are highly predictable.

We develop a dynamic model of the adoption of financial innovations. Each period, firms decide whether or not to adopt an innovation of uncertain value, and the profitability of each period’s adoptions reveals information about the innovation’s value. We show that characteristics of financial innovation waves cited by critics as evidence of irrational excess are, in fact, consistent with fully rational behavior. We also show that social welfare is enhanced when more firms adopt innovations of questionable value and that financial intermediaries have an incentive to encourage such adoption.

We analyze the performance of Japanese open-type stock mutual funds for the 1981–1992 period. The results show that, regardless of the performance measures and benchmarks employed, most of the Japanese mutual funds underperform the benchmarks by between 3.6% and 10.8% per annum. These funds tend to invest more in large stocks with low book-to-market ratios. But this feature does not explain the underperformance. A potential explanation is the dilution effect caused by inflows of funds. In Japan, a new investor of an open-type fund only pays in the after-tax value of the net asset value. We conduct a bootstrap experiment to assess the magnitude of this dilution effect.

This theory can explain why bank debt is universally senior, consistent with the presence of conflict lawyers) and absolute priority violations in financial distress: better organized banks would more strongly contest priority in financial distress if they were junior. Because "deterrence can reduce creditors' total expenses in a priority contest, the ex post stronger lobbyist/litigant should be senior ex ante. For equivalent reasons, the theory can advise when public debt should be senior to trade credit and/or implicit contracts, and can even suggest one rationale for the absolute priority rule (APR). This article further shows that Chapter HI creditor reimbursement procedures can lower overall costs. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

We examine intertemporal asset pricing when short sales are constrained in proportion to the value of an investor’s portfolio. All assets’ prices exceed every investor’s marginal utility of consumption-based valuation of the associated dividends if every investor finds himself constrained in some asset in some state; we exhibit such an equilibrium. An asset’s price decomposes into three (investor-specific) components: the consumption value of its dividends, a speculative value premium, and a collateral value premium. The validity of the no-arbitrage pricing approach is shown to depend critically on the difference between real securities and their synthetic counterparts.

In this article we characterize and estimate the process for short-term interest rates using federal funds interest rate data. We presume that we are observing a discrete-time sample of a stationary scalar diffusion. We concentrate on a class of models in which the local volatility elasticity is constant and the drift has a flexible specification. To accommodate missing observations and to break the link between “economic time” and calendar time, we model the sampling scheme as an increasing process that is not directly observed. We propose and implement two new methods for estimation. We find evidence for a volatility elasticity between one and one-half and two. When interest rates are high, local mean reversion is small and the mechanism for inducing stationarity is the increased volatility of the diffusion process.

We empirically demonstrate that the opportunities the Boston Stock Exchange and the Cincinnati Stock Exchange offer members to take the other side of their customers’ orders through affiliated market makers (to internalize orders) have little short-run effect on posted or effective bid-ask spreads. This is true despite substantial movement of order flow away from the New York Stock Exchange when trading under one of these regional stock exchange programs begins. These results contrast with the adverse effects of market fragmentation and internalization predicted by some theoretical market microstructure analyses and the popular financial press.