Knowledge that Transforms

I examine the anomalous behavior of the taxable and tax-exempt yield curves. Long municipal yields appear too high relative to the equivalent after-tax yield that can be earned in Treasury or corporate bonds. I discuss existing explanations of the problem and propose a simple model that relates the yields of taxable bonds to the yield curve for par tax exempts. The ratio of the tax-exempt yield to the taxable yield increases with maturity in the model, so it is consistent with observed phenomena such as inverted yield curves for taxables and contemporaneous rising yield curves for tax exempts. Statistical and descriptive comparisons between the yields predicted.by the model and observed yields on par bonds that the model has some promise in explaining the apparent anomalies in the behaviors of the two yield curves. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

In this article we break assets’ betas with common factors into components attributable to news about future cash flows, real interest rates, and excess returns. To achieve this decomposition, we use a vector autoregressive time-series model and an approximate log-linear present value relation. The betas of industry and size portfolios with the market are largely attributed to changing expected returns. Betas with inflation and industrial production reflect opposing cash flow and expected return effects. We also show how asset pricing theory restricts the expected excess return components of betas.

In aggregate, options on real and financial assets can have very different properties. Typically, the good or service produced by a real asset has a finite elasticity of demand and developers have finite capacities. Also, the supply of options can be limited, and developers can be less than perfectly competitive. In a subgame, perfect Nash equilibrium with these properties, the optimal exercise policy, and resulting values of developed and undeveloped assets are calculated explicitly. The novel comparative statics are discussed in details To date, options on real assets, like real estate, natural resources, and capital assets, have been analyzed only in partial equilibrium. 1 When viewed from the perspective of a single developer with a single undeveloped asset, real options have many characteristics in common with financial options. With real estate and other real assets, the option is an undeveloped property, the underlying asset is a developed property, the exercise price is the cost of development, and the maturity is generally infinite. In previous articles special characteristics of real options have been emphasized. These include the time to build, the often sto-I am grateful to Chester Spatt for suggesting this problem and to Chester

In an extension of the Kyle (1985) model of continuous insider trading, it is shown that asymmetric information can make it impossible to price options by arbitrage. Even when an option would appear to be redundant, its introduction into the market can cause the volatility of the underlying asset to become stochastic. This eliminates the potential for dynamically replicating the option. The change in the price process of the asset reflects a change in the information transmitted by volume and prices when the option is traded.

Previous research finds that fundamental macroeconomic news has little effect on stock prices. We show that after allowing for different stages of the business cycle, a stronger relationship between stock prices and news is evident. In addition to stock prices, we examine the effect of real activity news on proxies for expected cash flows and equity discount rates. We find that when the economy is strong the stock market responds negatively to news about higher real economic activity. This negative relation is caused by the larger increase in discount rates relative to expected cash flows.

We examine the structure of initial takeover bids and the frequency of observing competing bids and target management resistance. We find the use of cash is not consistently correlated with the frequency of competition or resistance and that the cost of acquiring information about a target is associated with the likelihood of competition and resistance. A high bid premium appears to deter competing offers and is also associated with a lower likelihood of resistance. Finally, target management resistance is associated with an increased likelihood of a competing offer arising and a larger increase in target shareholder wealth between the initial public announcement and outcome dates relative to the not-resisted subsample for both successful and unsuccessful acquisition proposals.

There is substantial evidence that insider trading is present around corporate announcements and that this insider trading is motivated by private information. Using real estate investment trusts that choose to reappraise themselves as our sample, we establish that the appraisals contain information, but find no market response to the public announcement of this information in these appraisals. We consider two possible explanations for this inconsistency: the first that the appraisal information is not highlighted in earnings reports and hence remains unobserved; and the second that insiders trade on the appraisal information in the time that elapses between the appraisal and its public announcement. We find strong support for the second hypothesis, with insiders buying (selling) after they receive favorable (unfavorable) appraisal news, especially for negative appraisals. We also find that positive (negative) appraisals and net insider buying (selling) elicit significant positive (negative) abnormal returns during the appraisal period.

In a one-period model of market making with many exogenously informed traders, we first show that the variance of prices and expected trading volume depend on the public information released at the start of trading. This is accomplished by representing beliefs with elliptically contoured distributions, for which the form of optimal decision rules does not depend on the specific distribution used. Second, if the model is altered so that the decision to become informed is made endogenous, then the decision rules of the market-maker and informed traders depend on the public information. Third, in a multiperiod model with many informed traders and long-lived private information, recursion formulas similar to those of Kyle (1985) hold for all elliptically contoured distributions, trading volume is autocorrelated and, unless per period liquidity trading is bounded away from zero as new trading periods are added, informed traders’ profits vanish.

A model of trading in speculative markets is developed based on differences of opinion among traders. Our purpose is to explain some of the empirical regularities that have been documented concerning the relationship between volume and price and the time-series properties of price and volume. We assume that traders share common prior beliefs and receive common information but differ in the way in which they interpret this information. Some results are that absolute price changes and volume are positively correlated, consecutive price changes exhibit negative serial correlation, and volume is positively autocorrelated.

We characterize a credit market equilibrium in which banks coexist with capital markets and firms obtain funding from both sources. An incentive problem exists between the firm’s insiders and outside providers of capital. Banks can provide not only credit but also monitoring services. We show that when banks cannot precommit to a particular level of monitoring, there is a unique credit market equilibrium with firms being financed with a combination of bank credit and external capital. In this equilibrium, a marginal substitution of bank credit for capital market financing would raise the firm’s stock price.