Knowledge that Transforms

We document a little-known source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows for the disclosure of previously unreleased information by the U.S. Government. Through FOIA requests, we identify several sophisticated institutional investors, chiefly hedge funds, that request information from the FDA. We explore the type of information commonly requested by funds and the types of firms that are targets of FDA-FOIA requests and show that FOIA requests allow these investors to generate abnormal returns. Thus, we illustrate a detailed mechanism through which costly information becomes incorporated into market prices. Received April 15, 2015; editorial decision April 16, 2016 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Size-discovery mechanisms allow large quantities of an asset to be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples include “workup” in Treasury markets, “matching sessions” in corporate bond and CDS markets, and block-trading “dark pools” in equity markets. By freezing the execution price and giving up on market-clearing, size-discovery mechanisms overcome concerns by large investors over their price impacts. Price-discovery mechanisms clear the market, but cause investors to internalize their price impacts, inducing costly delays in the reduction of position imbalances. We show how augmenting a price-discovery mechanism with a size-discovery mechanism improves allocative efficiency.

Management-aligned boards exchange precise information with management and make efficient decisions. But when agency conflicts are important, management-aligned boards may not maximize shareholder value. Even if management controls all decisions and the board only provides advice, optimal boards may withhold information. This creates inefficiencies. But agency costs fall because management is induced to obey the board. When the board can directly veto management proposals, shareholders are better off. Optimal boards should then be more shareholder-aligned. Shareholder value is further enhanced if shareholders can veto management and also commit to revealing the board’s information. Optimal boards should then be perfectly shareholder-aligned. Received September 26, 2015; editorial decision December 18, 2016 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

If the location of firm operations is relevant for financing, multinationals should have easier access to different foreign sources of funding relative to domestic firms. I document that U.S. multinationals are more likely to borrow from a foreign bank and to issue international bonds than are U.S. domestic firms. Multinationals are less affected than domestic firms by capital market dislocations because of greater funding flexibility. Using the 2007–2009 financial crisis as a capital supply shock, I find that multinationals relied more on foreign funding sources in bank loans and consequently reduced domestic investment less than did domestic firms. Received January 27, 2015; editorial decision March 20, 2017 by Editor David Denis.

We exploit Medicare national coverage reimbursement approvals as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate how the financing decisions of private and publicly traded firms respond to changes in investment opportunities. We find that publicly traded companies increase their external financing and their subsequent product introductions by more than private companies in response to national coverage approvals. Private equity financing is the primary source of the increased financing for public firms. We show that the stock characteristics of publicly traded firms, such as liquidity and price informativeness, and product market competition are important factors in explaining their financing advantage.

We study the nature of deflation risk by extracting the objective distribution of inflation from the market prices of inflation swaps and options. We find that the market expects inflation to average about 2.5% over the next 30 years. Despite this, the market places substantial weight on deflation scenarios in which prices significantly decline over extended horizons. The market prices the economic tail risk of deflation similarly to other types of tail risks, such as corporate default or catastrophic insurance losses. We find that deflation risk is strongly negatively correlated with outcomes in the financial markets and with consumer confidence. Received January 26, 2015; editorial decision November 14, 2016 by Editor Leonid Kogan.

In recent years, the banking industry has witnessed several cases of excessive risk-taking that frequently have been attributed to problematic professional norms. We conduct experiments with employees from several banks in which we manipulate the saliency of their professional identity and subsequently measure their risk aversion in a real stakes investment task. If bank employees are exposed to professional norms that favor risk-taking, they should become more willing to take risks when their professional identity is salient. We find, however, that subjects take significantly less risk, challenging the view that the professional norms generally increase bank employees’ willingness to take risks. Received May 5, 2016; editorial decision August 21, 2016 by Editor Philip Strahan.

Purchase obligations are forward contracts with suppliers and are used more broadly than traded commodity derivatives. This paper is the first to document that these contracts are a risk management tool and have a material impact on corporate hedging activity. Firms that expand their risk management options following the introduction of steel futures contracts substitute financial hedging for purchase obligations. Contracting frictions, such as bargaining power and settlement risk, as well as potential hold-up issues associated with relationship-specific investment, affect the use of purchase obligations in the cross-section, as well as how firms respond to the introduction of steel futures. Received May 31, 2016; editorial decision March 17, 2017 by Editor David Denis.

I use a life-cycle model of housing demand to infer expectations about house prices and home equity requirements for the housing boom of the 2000s from observed household choices. Expectations and credit constraints are separately identified from the intensive and extensive margins of housing demand. The main results are that (1) expected price growth was close to average long-run growth, (2) home equity requirements were lax initially, but tightened after the bust, and (3) subjective uncertainty about future price growth was large. Given the option to default on mortgage debt, greater price uncertainty leads to higher optimal household leverage.

Many researchers use the G-index or E-index to measure firms’ takeover defenses. Others argue that these indices are not related to firms’ takeover likelihoods. We find that, unlike their raw values, the instrumented versions of these indices are significantly and negatively related to acquisition likelihood. The difference between the raw and instrumented results indicates that the G-index and E-index include an endogenous component and highlights the importance of accounting for endogeneity in tests that use takeover indices to measure takeover deterrence. We provide data on new instruments that researchers can use to address these issues.Received April 13, 2016; editorial decision October 14, 2016 by Editor David Dennis.