Knowledge that Transforms

Over the past decade several countries, including the US, have introduced or redesigned legislation that confers priority in bankruptcy upon all or some bank deposits. We argue that in the presence of contracting costs such rules can increase efficiency. We first show in a private information model that a borrower can reduce overall costs of finance by letting informationally heterogeneous lenders choose between junior and senior debt. In particular, we find that debt priorities reduce socially wasteful information gathering by investors. We then argue why, particularly in banking, legal standardization of debt priorities may be superior to bilateral private arrangements.

Journal Article The Opportunity for Conspiracy in Asset Markets Organized with Dealer Intermediaries Get access Timothy N. Cason Timothy N. Cason Purdue University Address correspondence to Timothy N. Cason, Department of Economics, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1310, or E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 13, Issue 2, April 2000, Pages 385–416, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/13.2.385 Published: 15 June 2015

Arguments for creating a market to allow trading the portfolio of all endowments in the entire world, the “market portfolio”, are considered. This world share market would represent a radical innovation, since at the present time only a small fraction of world endowments are traded. Using a stochastic endowment economy where preference are mean variance, it is shown that creating such a market may be justified in terms of its contribution to social welfare. It is also argued that creating a market for world shares is attractive for certain reasons of robustness and simplicity.

This unusual book is not intended chiefly as a textbook for investment courses. The book's principal target audience is quantitatively inclined investment management professionals with some masters-level knowledge of finance. However, it could make an excellent textbook for a second-year MBA course in quantitative portfolio management; the authors mention this as a possible use of the book. Be warned: anyone teaching a course based on this book would need to make a substantial commitment to mastering and expositing a large body of unfamiliar, analytical material. The payoff would be a class full of students who could not complain that the course was not practically relevant. Alternatively, the book could play a valuable supporting role in an investments course as optional outside reading. Many M.B.A. students query the usefulness of modern portfolio theory in business applications. In this book the authors nearly describe how to build a fully functional investment management business, and it is all done on a foundation of modern portfolio theory.

We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratios may be ineffective in controlling risk taking. We propose, instead, a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives, in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentive features of top-management compensation. With this scheme, we show that bank owners choose an optimal management compensation structure that induces first-best value-maximizing investment choices by a bank's management. We explicitly characterize the parameters of the optimal management compensation structure and the fairly priced FDIC insurance premium in the presence of a single or multiple sources of agency problems.

We analyze the incentives of investment banks to develop innovative products. We show that client characteristics and market structure affect these incentives significantly. Investment banks with larger market shares have greater incentives to innovate and smaller banks are likely to share their innovations with the largest bank. Innovation incentives increase in volatile environments and regulatory scrutiny actually encourages loophole exploitation activity. Our predictions are consistent with stylized facts and the analysis has broad testable implications for innovative activity in other markets similarly characterized by a lack of comprehensive protection for intellectual property rights, for example, the software industry. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

Recent empirical evidence suggests that expected stock returns are weakly, or even negatively, related to the volatility of stock returns at the market level, and that this relation varies substantially over time. This evidence contradicts the apparently reliable intuition that risk and return are positively related and that stock market volatility is a good proxy for risk. This paper investigates the relation between volatility and expected returns in a general equilibrium, exchange economy. A relatively simple model, estimated using aggregate consumption data, is able to duplicate the salient features of the observed expected return/volatility relation. The key features of the model are the existence of two regimes with different consumption growth processes and time-varying correlations between stock returns and the marginal rate of substitution; thus inducing variability in the short-run relation between expected returns and volatility and a weakening of the long-run relation. These results highlight the perils of relying on intuition from static models. They also have important implications for the empirical modeling of returns.

We estimate sequentially outcome probabilities and expected payoffs associated with first, second, and final bids in a large sample of tender offer contests. Rival bids arrive quickly and produce large bid jumps. Greater bidder toeholds (prebid ownership of target shares) reduce the probability of competition and target resistance and are associated with both lower bid premiums and lower prebid target stock price runups. The expected payoff to target shareholders is increasing in the bid premium and in the probability of competition, but decreasing in the bidder's toehold. The initial bidder's expected payoff is significantly positive in the “rival-bidder-win” outcome, in part reflecting gains from the pending toehold sale. Despite these dramatic toehold effects, only half of the initial bidders acquire toeholds.

We investigate the effect of asymmetric information on prices and liquidity by analyzing trades, quotes, spreads, and depths. Information content should increase with trade size and the information asymmetry of the trading period. Results show that price and liquidity effects are significantly associated with information content as measured by both trade size and timing relative to information events. Results are stronger for purchases than sales. Quoted prices are better measures of information effects than transaction prices, because they control for bid-ask bounce. Finally, trades that a priori contain no information have no impact on prices and liquidity, despite their large size.

Forward rate dynamics are modeled as a random field. In contrast to multifactor models, random field models offer a parsimonious description of term structure dynamics, while eliminating the self-inconsistent practice of recalibration. The form of the drift of the instantaneous forward rate process necessary to preclude arbitrage under the risk-neutral measure is obtained. Forward risk-adjusted measures are identified and used to price a bond option when the forward volatility structure depends on the square root of the current spot rate. Several classes of tractable random field models are presented.