Knowledge that Transforms

We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers' stock-selection abilities. This generalized-inverse alpha (GIA) approach reveals differences in the ability of managers to predict firms' future earnings from fundamental research. Notably, the GIA's return-forecasting power is not subsumed by publicly available quantitative predictors, such as momentum, value, and earnings quality, nor is it subsumed by methods shown in past research to forecast stock returns using fund holdings or trades.

We model long-run firm performance, management compensation, and corporate governance in a dynamic, nonstationary world. Many features of governance and compensation that have caused consternation among commentators arise naturally in this dynamic setting, even though boards are rational and managers are powerless. Compensation changes depend on changes in the evolution of a latent state variable outside the manager's control. Board passivity is positively correlated with both the value of management compensation and the firm's good fortune. Managerial opportunism tends to follow sudden reversals of good fortune. Moreover, managerial private benefits, by increasing managers' stake in the long-run viability of the firm, may actually ameliorate agency conflicts.

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008:Q3––Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in volatile and liquid stocks. In comparison, redemptions and stock sales for mutual funds were not as severe. We show that hedge fund investors withdraw capital three times as intensely as mutual fund investors do in response to poor returns. We relate this stronger sensitivity to losses to share liquidity restrictions and institutional ownership in hedge funds.

This article proposes a theory of investment fluctuations in which the source of the oscillating dynamics is an agency problem between financiers and entrepreneurs. In the model, investment decisions depend on entrepreneurs' initiative to select investment projects ex ante, and financiers' incentive to control entrepreneurs ex post. Too much control discourages entrepreneurial incentive to initiate new investment, whereas too little control jeopardizes its productivity. This initiative-control trade-off is capable of generating endogenous reversal of investment booms, induced by an ongoing deterioration of project profitability. Investment fluctuations may arise even though no external shocks hit the economy and agents are perfectly rational. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This study examines takeover bidding contests in which privately informed bidders have incentives to signal high values to uninformed investors through their bids. Such incentives could arise in a large number of situations from financing and managerial concerns. The findings show that the dynamic nature of the takeover contests plays a critical role in the signaling process, allowing bidders to signal high values in two ways. Such signaling bears important consequences on the bids, the allocative efficiency, the target's and bidders' profits, as well as the winner's post-takeover stock price performance and volatility. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This article solves the portfolio choice problem in a multi-asset jump-diffusion model. We decompose the optimal portfolio weight into components that correspond to a collection of fictitious economies, one of which is a standard diffusion economy, and the others of which are pure-jump economies. We derive a semi-closed-form solution for the optimal portfolio weight, and investigate its properties with or without ambiguity aversion. We find that an investor may not reduce her investment in risky assets when facing more frequent jumps, as suggested by a single-asset jump-diffusion model. Moreover, an investor who is extremely cautious about her estimates of higher moments of asset returns may still hold risky assets, contrary to the prediction of a pure-diffusion model with ambiguity aversion to the first moment. (JEL G11) It has been widely documented that stock returns exhibit both stochastic volatility and jumps (see, for example, Bakshi, Cao, and Chen 1997; Bates 2000; Eraker, Johannes, and Polson 2003). With jumps, an asset return model can explicitly allow for sudden but infrequent market movements of large magnitude, thus capturing both the “skewed ” and “fat-tailed ” features of stock

We provide fully analytical, optimal dynamic hedges in incomplete markets by employing the traditional minimum-variance criterion. Our hedges are in terms of generalized “Greeks” and naturally extend no-arbitrage–based risk management in complete markets to incomplete markets. Whereas the literature characterizes either minimum-variance static, myopic, or dynamic hedges from which a hedger may deviate unless able to precommit, our hedges are time-consistent. We apply our results to derivatives replication with infrequent trading and determine hedges and replication values, which reduce to generalized Black-Scholes expressions in specific settings. We also investigate dynamic hedging with jumps, stochastic correlation, and portfolio management with benchmarking.

Fair value accounting forces institutions to revalue inventory whenever a transaction occurs. An institution that faces a balance sheet constraint may have incentives to suspend trading in Level 3 assets (traded on opaque over-the-counter markets) in order to avoid such marking-to-market. This keeps the book valuation artificially high, relaxing the balance sheet constraint. But, the institution loses direct control of the risk of its position. Solving this "real options" problem, the institution will report profits as they occur but delay reporting losses. A regulator trying to control risk imposes fines for balance sheet manipulation and capital requirements. Both these tools can increase risk-taking and balance sheet manipulation. Audits in comparision generally decrease risk-taking but may be costly to the regulator. The model provides predictions on the distribution of a bank's trading gains in illiquid markets. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

Default probability plays a central role in the static trade-off theory of capital structure. We directly test this theory by regressing the probability of default on proxies for costs and benefits of debt. Contrary to predictions of the theory, firms with higher bankruptcy costs, i.e., smaller firms and firms with lower asset tangibility, choose capital structures with higher bankruptcy risk. Further analysis suggests that the capital structures of smaller firms with lower asset tangibility—which tend to have less access to capital markets—are more sensitive to negative profitability and equity value shocks, making them more susceptible to bankruptcy risk.

We analyze corporate lending when loan officers must be incentivized to prospect for loans and to transmit the soft information they obtain in that process. We explore how this multi-task agency problem shapes loan officers' compensation, banks' use of soft information in credit approval, and their lending standards. When competition intensifies, prospecting for loans becomes more important and banks' internal agency problems worsen. In response to more competition, banks lower lending standards, may choose to disregard soft and use only hard information in their credit approval, and in that case reduce loan officers to salespeople with steep, volume-based compensation. Our model generates “excessive lending” as banks' optimal response to an internal agency problem.