Knowledge that Transforms

Executives can only impact firm outcomes if they have influence over crucial decisions. On the basis of this idea, we develop and test the hypothesis that firms whose CEOs have more decision-making power should experience more variability in performance. Focusing primarily on the power the CEO has over the board and other top executives as a consequence of his formal position and titles, status as a founder, and status as the board's sole insider, we find that stock returns are more variable for firms run by powerful CEOs. Our findings suggest that the interaction between executive characteristics and organizational variables has important consequences for firm performance. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Empirically, a price increase accompanies the announcement of an open-market stock repurchase program, even though the announcement is not a commitment. In fact, for many announced programs no shares are ever actually repurchased. This article explores this puzzle. In the single-firm-type version of the model, the option that a firm grants itself by announcing a program does not generate announcement returns. In equilibrium, long-run gains from the informed trading that the option creates are offset by short-run costs from the market's accounting for this adverse selection. Based on this trade-off, I construct a signaling (two-type) model that can deliver announcement returns. In the separating equilibrium, good firms do not incur any cost when they announce programs. Their gains from informed trading in the long run offset the cost of announcement incurred in the short run. Mimicry is costly, because a bad firm's long-run gains from informed trading cannot compensate for the short-run cost of announcing.

This article presents a continuous-time agency model in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard with a risk-averse agent and a risk-neutral principal. Under the model setup, we show that the optimal controls are constant over time, and thus the optimal menu consists of contracts that are linear in the final outcome. We also show that when a moral hazard problem adds to an adverse selection problem, the monotonicity condition well known in the pure adverse selection literature needs to be modified to ensure the incentive compatibility for information revelation. The model is applied to a few managerial compensation problems involving managerial project selection and capital budgeting decisions. We argue that in the third-best world, the relationship between the volatility of the outcome and the sensitivity of the contract depends on interactions between the managerial cost and the firm's production functions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, sometimes the higher the volatility, the higher the sensitivity of the contract. The firm receiving good news sometimes chooses safer projects or invests less than it does with bad news. We also examine the effects of the observability of the volatility on corporate investment decisions.

Because a money manager learns more about her skill from her management experience than outsiders can learn from her realized returns, she expects inefficiency in future contracts that condition exclusively on realized returns. A fund family that learns what the manager learns can reduce this inefficiency cost if the family is large enough. The family's incentive is to retain any given manager regardless of her skill but, when the family has enough managers, it adds value by boosting the credibility of its retentions through the firing of others. As the number of managers grows, the efficiency loss goes to zero.

This article studies the asset pricing implication of imprecise knowledge about rare events. Modeling rare events as jumps in the aggregate endowment, we explicitly solve the equilibrium asset prices in a pure-exchange economy with a representative agent who is averse not only to risk but also to model uncertainty with respect to rare events. The equilibrium equity premium has three components: the diffusive- and jump-risk premiums, both driven by risk aversion; and the "rare-event premium," driven exclusively by uncertainty aversion. To disentangle the rare-event premiums from the standard risk-based premiums, we examine the equilibrium prices of options across moneyness or, equivalently, across varying sensitivities to rare events. We find that uncertainty aversion toward rare events plays an important role in explaining the pricing differentials among options across moneyness, particularly the prevalent "smirk" patterns documented in the index options market.

The proliferation of novel preference theories in financial economics is hampered by a lack of non-experimental evidence and by the theories' additional complexity which has not been shown to be critical in applications. In this article I present arguments in support of preferences with rank dependency. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances data, I document two widespread patterns inconsistent with expected utility: (i) many households simultaneously invest in well-deversified funds and in poorly-diversified portfolios of stocks; and (ii) some households with substantial savings do not invest anything in equities. I show that portfolio choice models with rank-dependent preferences, plausibly parameterized and under fully rational assumptions, are quantitatively consistent with the observed diversification. These results call for further efforts to integrate the models of rank-dependent preferences in portfolio theory and asset pricing.

We investigate expectation formation in a controlled experimental environment. Subjects are asked to predict the price in a standard asset pricing model. They do not have knowledge of the underlying market equilibrium equations, but they know all past realized prices and their own predictions. Aggregate demand for the risky asset depends upon the forecasts of the participants. The realized price is then obtained from market equilibrium with feedback from six individual expectations. Realized prices differ significantly from fundamental values and typically exhibit oscillations around, or slow convergence to, this fundamental. In all groups participants coordinate on a common prediction strategy.

This article explores cross-market liquidity dynamics by estimating a vector autoregressive model for liquidity (bid-ask spread and depth, returns, volatility, and order flow in the stock and Treasury bond markets). Innovations to stock and bond market liquidity and volatility are significantly correlated, implying that common factors drive liquidity and volatility in these markets. Volatility shocks are informative in predicting shifts in liquidity. During crisis periods, monetary expansions are associated with increased liquidity. Moreover, money flows to government bond funds forecast bond market liquidity. The results establish a link between "macro" liquidity, or money flows, and "micro" or transactions liquidity.

This article develops an integrated model of asset pricing and moral hazard. It is demonstrated that the expected dollar return of a stock is independent of managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk, but the equilibrium price of the stock depends on them. Thus, the expected rate of return is affected by managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk. It is shown, however, that managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk affect the expected rate of return through their influence on systematic risk rather than serve as independent risk factors. It is also shown that the risk aversion of the principal in the model leads to less emphasis on relative performance evaluation than in a model with a risk-neutral principal.

We demonstrate that limited participation can arise endogenously in the presence of model uncertainty and heterogeneous uncertainty-averse investors. When uncertainty dispersion among investors is small, full participation prevails in equilibrium. Equity premium is related to the average uncertainty among investors and a conglomerate trades at a price equal to the sum of its single-segment components. When uncertainty dispersion is large, investors with high uncertainty choose not to participate in the stock market, resulting in limited market participation. When limited participation occurs, participation rate and equity premium can decrease in uncertainty dispersion and a conglomerate trades at a discount.