Knowledge that Transforms

Journal Article Cover Get access The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, February 2016, Page i1, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhv092 Published: 14 January 2016

Journal Article Cover Get access The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 29, Issue 7, July 2016, Page i1, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhv112 Published: 09 June 2016

Can shareholder voting prevent managers from destroying value in corporate acquisitions? Previous studies based on U.S. data are inconclusive because shareholder approval is discretionary. We study the U.K. where approval is mandatory for deals exceeding a multivariate relative-size threshold. We find that in the U.K. shareholders gain 8 cents per dollar at announcement with mandatory voting, or $13.6 billion over 1992-2010 in aggregate; without voting, U.K. shareholders lost $3 billion. U.S. shareholders lost $214 billion in matched deals. Differences-in-differences and multidimensional regression discontinuity analyses support a causal interpretation. Our evidence suggests that mandatory voting imposes a binding constraint on acquirer CEOs.

We propose and test a theory of using commodities as collateral for financing. Under capital control and collateral constraint, investors import commodities and pledge them as collateral to earn higher expected returns. Higher collateral demands increase commodity prices and make the inventory–convenience yield relation less negative. Our model illustrates these equilibrium effects and suggests that the violation of covered interest-rate parity is a proxy for collateral demands. Evidence from eight commodities in China and developed markets supports the theoretical predictions. Our findings complement the theory of storage and provide new insights into the financialization of commodity markets. Received July 16, 2015; accepted April 7, 2016 by Editor Stefan Nagel.

Journal Article Cover Get access The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 29, Issue 4, April 2016, Page i1, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhv100 Published: 04 March 2016

Journal Article Cover Get access The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 29, Issue 5, May 2016, Page i1, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhv104 Published: 06 April 2016

We study feedback from the risk of outstanding mortgage-backed securities (MBS) on the level and volatility of interest rates. We incorporate supply shocks resulting from changes in MBS duration into a parsimonious equilibrium dynamic term structure model and derive three predictions that are strongly supported in the data: (1) MBS duration positively predicts nominal and real excess bond returns, especially for longer maturities; (2) the predictive power of MBS duration is transitory in nature; and (3) MBS convexity increases interest rate volatility, and this effect has a hump-shaped term structure.

We propose a novel human capital model that decomposes aggregate income risk into high- and low-income risk. We find that high-income risk is priced, while low-income risk is insignificant. The high-income factor alone explains 77% of the cross-sectional variation in the twenty-five size and book-to-market portfolios, earns a risk premium of about 7% per year, and its pricing power extends to the full cross-section of individual stocks. It is also related to the value factor, suggesting that the value premium might be compensation for income risk. Overall, our evidence indicates that high-income risk is an important macroeconomic risk factor. Received April 21, 2010; accepted January 25, 2016, by Editor Geert Bekaert.