Knowledge that Transforms

Behavioral theories suggest that investor misperceptions and market mispricing will be correlated across firms. We use equity and debt financing to identify common misvaluation across firms. A zero-investment portfolio (UMO, undervalued minus overvalued) built from repurchase and issue firms captures comovement in returns beyond that in some standard multifactor models, and substantially improves the Sharpe ratio of the tangency portfolio. Loadings on UMO incrementally predict the cross-section of returns on both portfolios and individual stocks, even among firms not recently involved in external financing activities. Further evidence suggests that UMO loadings proxy for the common component of a stock's misvaluation.

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.

In this paper we examine the effects of capital gains taxation on firms' investment and financing decisions. We develop a real-options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm's capital structure are endogenously and jointly determined. Our analysis demonstrates that the asymmetric taxation of capital gains and losses fosters investment by eroding the option value of waiting. It also shows that firms controlled by taxable investors employ more equity financing, the higher the firm's stock price and the worse the firm's historical performance. Using a large sample of U.S. industrial firms that are owned by taxable investors between 1970 and 2008, we present new evidence on corporate investment and financing policies, which is supportive of the model's predictions.

In this article, we derive an analytic expression for the representative agent of a large class of economies populated by agents with “catching up with the Joneses” preferences, but who exhibit heterogeneous risk aversion. As Chan and Kogan (2002) show numerically, the representative agent has stochastic risk that moves countercyclically to the state variable. However, we show that heterogeneity of risk aversion alone is insufficient for explaining empirical regularities—namely the variability of the Sharpe ratio—that Campbell and Cochrane (1999) obtain in a model of a representative agent with stochastic risk aversion.

A new decomposition of the optimal portfolio, in dynamic models with von Neumann–Morgenstern preferences and Ito prices, is established. The formula rests on a change of numéraire that uses pure discount bonds as units of account. The dynamic hedging demand has two components. The first hedge insures against fluctuations in an optimally designed bond with a maturity date matching the investor's horizon. The second hedge immunizes against fluctuations in the market price of risk in the bond numéraire. Various applications are examined. New results concerning the behavior of extremely risk-averse individuals, the demand for bonds and its long-horizon limit, and the optimal portfolio in incomplete markets are derived.

We show that, when stock prices are subject to stochastic mispricing errors, expected rates of return may depend not only on the fundamental risk that is captured by a standard asset pricing model, but also on the type and degree of asset mispricing, even when the mispricing is zero on average. Empirically, the mispricing induced return premium, either estimated using a Kalman filter or proxied by the volatility and variance ratio of residual returns, is shown to be significantly associated with realized risk-adjusted returns.

As an alternative to the pecking order, we develop a dynamic calibratable model where the firm avoids mispricing via signaling. The model is rich, featuring endogenous invest-ment, debt, default, dividends, equity flotations, and share repurchases. In equilibrium, firms with negative private information have negative leverage, issue equity, and overin-vest. Firms signal positive information by substituting debt for equity. Default costs induce such firms to underinvest. Model simulations reveal that repeated signaling can account for countercyclical leverage, leverage persistence, volatile procylical investment, and correla-tion between size and leverage. The model generates other novel predictions. Investment rates are the key predictor of abnormal announcement returns in simulated data, with lever-age only predicting returns unconditionally. Firms facing asymmetric information actually exhibit higher mean Q ratios and investment rates. (JEL G32) Three decades have passed since Leland and Pyle (1977) and Ross (1977) de-veloped the signaling theory of corporate finance. Although their work has been extended, signaling models remain static and qualitative, making it im-possible for empiricists to assess the theory’s ability to match observed time-

Panel data on corporate ownership in thirty-four countries between 1995 and 2006 reveal that newly public firms have concentrated ownership regardless of the level of investor protection. After listing, firms in countries with strong investor protection are more likely to experience decreases in ownership concentration; these decreases occur in response to growth opportunities, and they are associated with new share issuance. We conclude that ownership concentration falls after listing in countries with strong investor protection, because firms in these countries continue to raise capital and grow, diluting blockholders as a consequence.

This article examines information and incentive problems that can exist in the market for commercial mortgages that are pooled and repackaged as commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBSs). We find that mortgages that are originated by institutions with large negative stock returns in the quarters prior to the origination date tend to have higher credit spreads and default more than other mortgages with similar observable characteristics. Properties financed with these mortgages also exhibit weaker post-securitization operating performance. In addition, stock price loser institutions are anxious to securitize mortgages they originate more quickly. Finally we find that credit rating agencies require higher levels of subordination for CMBS pools (i.e., view these pools as riskier) that include more mortgages originated by underperforming originators. This evidence is consistent with reputation models in which poorly performing originators have less incentive to carefully evaluate the credit quality of prospective borrowers, thereby letting relatively riskier mortgages pass through their weaker screening standards.

We investigate corporate financial policies in the presence of both temporary and permanent shocks to firms’ cash flows. In our framework, cash flows can be negative and are imperfectly correlated with firm value, and earnings volatility differs from asset volatility. These results are consistent with empirical stylized facts. They are also contrary to the implications of existing dynamic capital structure models that allow only for permanent shocks to cash flows. Temporary shocks increase the importance of financial flexibility and may provide an intuitively simple and realistic explanation of empirically observed financial conservatism and low leverage phenomena. The theoretical framework developed in this article general enough to be used in various corporate finance applications.