Knowledge that Transforms

We study the implications of introducing demand shocks and trade in goods into an otherwise standard international asset pricing model. Trade in goods gives rise to an additional channel of international propagation—through the terms of trade—absent in traditional single-good models. The inclusion of demand shocks helps overturn many unrealistic implications of existing international finance models in which productivity shocks are the sole source of uncertainty. Our model generates a rich set of implications on how stock, bond, and foreign exchange markets co-move. We solve the model in closed-form, which yields a system of equations that can be readily estimated empirically. Our estimation validates the main predictions of the theory.

We study the relation between households' stock purchases and stock purchases made by their neighbors. A ten percentage point increase in neighbors' purchases of stocks from an industry is associated with a two percentage point increase in households' own purchases of stocks from that industry. The effect is considerably larger for local stocks and among households in more social states. Controlling for area sociability, households' and neighbors' investment style preferences, and the industry composition of local firms, we attribute approximately one-quarter to one-half of the correlation between households' stock purchases and stock purchases made by their neighbors to word-of-mouth communication.

This article studies how a shock to the financial health of banks, caused by a decline in the asset markets, affects the real economy. The land market collapse in Japan provides an ideal testing field in separating the impact of a loan supply shock from demand shocks. I find that banks with greater real estate exposure have to reduce lending. Firms investment and market valuation are negatively associated with their top lenders real estate exposure. The lending channel is economically important: it accounts for one-third of lending contraction, one-fifth of the decline in investment, and a quarter of value loss.

We examine the theoretical predictions that link acquirer returns to diversity of opinion and information asymmetry. Theory suggests that acquirer abnormal returns should be negatively related to information asymmetry and diversity-of-opinion proxies for equity offers but not cash offers. We find that this is the case and that, more strikingly, there is no difference in abnormal returns between cash offers for public firms, equity offers for public firms, and equity offers for private firms after controlling for one of these proxies, idiosyncratic volatility.

We provide a model-free test for asymmetric correlations in which stocks move more often with the market when the market goes down than when it goes up, and also provide such tests for asymmetric betas and covariances. When stocks are sorted by size, book-to-market, and momentum, we find strong evidence of asymmetries for both size and momentum portfolios, but no evidence for book-to-market portfolios. Moreover, we evaluate the economic significance of incorporating asymmetries into investment decisions, and find that they can be of substantial economic importance for an investor with a disappointment aversion (DA) preference as described by Ang, Bekaert, and Liu (2005).

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. We analyze a database of trades between broker-dealers and customers in municipal bonds. These data were only released to the public with a lag; the market was opaque. Dealers earn lower average markups on larger trades, even though dealers bear a higher risk of losses with larger trades. We estimate a bargaining model and compute measures of dealer?s bargaining power. Dealers exercise substantial market power. Our measures of market power decrease in trade size and increase in the complexity of the trade for the dealer.

We develop an agency model of financial contracting. We derive long-term debt, a line of credit, and equity as optimal securities, capturing the debt coupon and maturity; the interest rate and limits on the credit line; inside versus outside equity; dividend policy; and capital structure dynamics. The optimal debt-equity ratio is history dependent, but debt and credit line terms are independent of the amount financed and, in some cases, the severity of the agency problem. In our model, the agent can divert cash flows; we also consider settings in which the agent undertakes hidden effort, or can control cash flow risk.

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of last-sale trade reporting on the liquidity of BBB corporate bonds. Overall, adding transparency has either a neutral or a positive effect on liquidity. Increased transparency is not associated with greater trading volume. Except for very large trades, spreads on newly transparent bonds decline relative to bonds that experience no transparency change. However, we find no effect on spreads for very infrequently traded bonds. The observed decrease in transaction costs is consistent with investors’ ability to negotiate better terms of trade once they have access to broader bond-pricing data. (JEL codes: G14, G18, G23, G24, G28)

We provide the impact on asset prices of search-and-bargaining frictions in over-the-counter markets. Under certain conditions, illiquidity discounts are higher when counterparties are harder to find, when sellers have less bargaining power, when the fraction of qualified owners is smaller, or when risk aversion, volatility, or hedging demand is larger. Supply shocks cause prices to jump, and then “recover” over time, with a time signature that is exaggerated by search frictions: The price jump is larger and the recovery is slower in less liquid markets. We discuss a variety of empirical implications.

Journal Article Industry Information Diffusion and the Lead-lag Effect in Stock Returns Get access Kewei Hou Kewei Hou Department of Finance, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University Address correspondence to Kewei Hou, Department of Finance, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, or e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 20, Issue 4, July 2007, Pages 1113–1138, https://doi.org/10.1093/revfin/hhm003 Published: 22 January 2007