Knowledge that Transforms

[We test whether stock market mispricing or private investor information in stock prices affects corporate investment. We develop an econometric methodology that disentangles stock-price movements that are relevant for investment from those that are not. We combine this decomposition with proxies for private information and mispricing to devise unbiased tests for the effects of mispricing and information on investment. We depart from much of the literature by finding that stock market mispricing does not affect investment, especially that of large firms and firms subject to mispricing. In contrast, we confirm previous evidence that managers incorporate private investor information when making investment decisions.]

[This article examines how price risk affects housing demand. It identifies two relevant channels: a financial risk effect that reduces demand, and a hedging effect that increases demand since current homes may hedge future housing costs. The latter dominates when hedging incentives are strong, namely when the likelihood of moving up the housing ladder is high and the tendency to move across markets is low. For households with weak hedging incentives, the article finds negative effects of price risk on the timing and size of home purchases, but positive effects for households with strong hedging incentives.]

[While standard contract theory suggests that a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effects of sector performance, there is evidence that CEO pay is strongly and positively related to such sector performance. In this article, we offer an explanation. We model a CEO charged with selecting the firm's strategy that determines the firm's exposure to sector performance. To incentivize the CEO to choose optimally, pay contracts will be positively and sometimes asymmetrically related to sector performance. Consistent with our predictions, the empirical analysis indicates that the observed sensitivity of pay to sector performance is almost fully confined to multisegment firms and is greater in firms that offer greater strategic flexibility to alter sector exposure, for more talented CEOs and for CEOs as compared to their subordinate executives. Our evidence is robust to alternate explanations such as CEO entrenchment.]

[Using a unique dataset of complete bid information for every IPO auction in Taiwan during 1995-2000, we examine the behaviors and returns of two groups—institutional and retail investors—in a setting in which underwriters do not have pricing or allocation discretion. We find that the bids of institutional investors are generally consistent with the predictions of IPO auction theory for informed bidders, while those of individual investors are not. Specifically, returns are higher when more institutional investors enter the auction or bid higher prices, suggesting institutional investors are informed and are also able to shave bids adequately. However, individual investors as a group exhibit return-chasing behavior, are uninformed, and systematically overbid.]

[This article explores the link between the composition of firms' capital and stock returns. I develop a general equilibrium production economy where firms use two factors: real estate and other capital. Investment is subject to asymmetric adjustment costs. Because real estate depreciates slowly, firms with high real estate holdings are more vulnerable to bad productivity shocks and hence are riskier and have higher expected returns. This prediction is supported empirically. I find that the returns of firms with a high share of real estate capital exceed that of low real estate firms by 3-6% annually, adjusted for exposures to the market return, size, value, and momentum factors. Moreover, conditional beta estimates reveal that these firms indeed have higher market betas, and the spread between the betas of high and low real estate firms is countercyclical.]

[Using word content analysis, we decompose information in the initial public offering prospectus into its standard and informative components. Greater informative content, as a proxy for premarket due diligence, results in more accurate offer prices and less underpricing, because it decreases the issuing firm's reliance on bookbuilding to price the issue. The opposite is true for standard content. Greater content from high reputation underwriters and issuing firm managers, through Management's Discussion and Analysis, contribute to the informativeness of the prospectus. Our results suggest that premarket due diligence and disclosure by underwriters and issuers can serve as a substitute for costly bookbuilding.]

[Commercial real estate expected returns and expected rent growth rates are time-varying. Relying on transactions data from a cross-section of U.S. metropolitan areas, we find that up to 30% of the variability of realized returns to commercial real estate can be accounted for by expected return variability, while expected rent growth rate variability explains up to 45% of the variability of realized rent growth rates. The cap rate—that is, the rent-price ratio in commercial real estate—captures fluctuations in expected returns for apartments and retail properties, as well as industrial properties. For offices, by contrast, cap rates do not forecast (in-sample) returns even though expected returns on offices are also time-varying. As implied by the present value relation, cap rates marginally forecast office rent growth but not rent growth of apartments, retail properties, and industrial properties. We link these differences in in-sample predictability to differences in the stochastic properties of the underlying commercial real estate data-generating processes. Also, rent growth predictability is observed mostly in locations characterized by higher population density and stringent land-use restrictions. The opposite is true for return predictability. The dynamic portfolio implications of time-varying commercial real estate returns are also explored in the context of a portfolio manager investing in the aggregate stock market and Treasury bills, as well as commercial real estate.]

[A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions at both the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. This article investigates the determinants of the decision to go private over a firm's entire public life cycle. Our evidence reveals that firms with declining growth in analyst coverage, falling institutional ownership, and low stock turnover were more likely to go private and opted to do so sooner. We argue that a primary reason behind the decision of IPO firms to abandon their public listing was a failure to attract a critical mass of financial visibility and investor interest.]

[This article advocates a theory of expectation formation that incorporates many of the central motivations of behavioral finance theory while retaining much of the discipline of the rational expectations approach. We provide a framework in which agents, in an asset pricing model, underparameterize their forecasting model in a spirit similar to Hong, Stein, and Yu (2007) and Barberis, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998), except that the parameters of the forecasting model and the choice of predictor are determined jointly in equilibrium. We show that multiple equilibria can exist even if agents choose only models that maximize (risk-adjusted) expected profits. A real-time learning formulation yields endogenous switching between equilibria. We demonstrate that a real-time learning version of the model, calibrated to U. S. stock data, is capable of reproducing regime-switching returns and volatilities, as recently identified by Guidolin and Timmermann]

[Traditional portfolio balance theory derives a downward sloping currency demand function from limited international asset substitutability. Historically, this theory enjoyed little empirical support. We provide direct evidence by examining the exchange rate effect of a major redefinition of the MSCI Global Equity Index in 2001 and 2002. The index redefinition implied large changes in the representation of different countries in the MSCI Global Equity Index and therefore produced strong exogenous equity flows by index funds. Our event study reveals that countries with a relatively increasing equity representation experienced a relative currency appreciation upon announcement of the index change. Moreover, stock markets that are upweighted (downweighted) feature a higher (lower) permanent comovement of their currency with the basket of other MSCI currencies.]