Knowledge that Transforms

We propose a model of delegated asset management that can explain the following empirical regularities in international markets: the presence of home bias, the lower proportion of mutual funds investing domestically, and the higher market value of mutual funds investing domestically. In the model, fund managers choose whether to specialize in domestic or foreign assets. Individual investors are uncertain about managers' abilities, and they are more informed about domestic markets. This makes domestic investments less risky and generates home bias. Home bias is magnified because higher-ability managers specialize in domestic assets, making them even more attractive to the investors.

Labor union pension funds have become increasingly vocal in governance matters; however, their motives are subject to fierce debate. I examine the proxy votes of AFL-CIO union funds around an exogenous change in the union representation of workers across firms. AFL-CIO affiliated shareholders become significantly less opposed to directors once the AFL-CIO labor organization no longer represents a firm's workers. Other institutional investors, including mutual funds and public pension funds, do not exhibit similar voting behavior. Union opposition is also associated with negative valuation effects. The data suggest that some investors pursue worker interests, rather than maximize shareholder value alone.

Michigan. I want to thank the audience members for their comments and for encouraging me to produce an editorial based on the speech. I also want to thank Professor Hirshleifer for both his comments on an earlier draft and for giving me the opportunity to publish the Review of Financial Studies ’ (RFS) first editorial. I also want to thank Martijn Cremers, Andrew Karolyi, Nancy Nash-Mendez, Paul Tetlock, and Michael Weisbach for their comments. Nothing in here should be construed as representing the views of the Society for Financial Studies or the current editorial board of the RFS. Editorial: Presumably, academic journals exist and publish articles to disseminate new ideas. Somehow that simple goal has been lost. Today, articles appear in print only after a referee is convinced that all other alternative explanations for its results have been ruled out. In reality, no article can exclude every possible alternative, so this is basically an exercise in futility. The criterion for publication should be that once an article crosses some threshold it is good enough to publish. The problem seemingly lies in our inability to say “good enough. ” But this is a problem we can fix. 2 Foreword Because this is an editorial, I want to warn the reader not to expect either the prose or evidence

This article studies a dynamic agency problem in which a risk-averse agent can save privately. In the optimal contract, (i) cash compensations exhibit downward rigidity to failures; (ii) permanent pay raises occur when the agent's historical performance is sufficiently good; (iii) and when the agent is dismissed due to poor performance, he walks away with severance pay to support his post-firing consumption at the current compensation level. Thus, the theory can simultaneously explain the popularity of options-like compensation contracts and the increasing incidence of forced turnovers with sizeable severance pay. 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.

By buying convertibles and shorting the underlying stock, hedge funds distribute equity exposure to well-diversified shareholders. We find that firms with characteristics that make seasoned equity offerings expensive are more likely to issue convertibles to hedge funds. We conclude that hedge funds provide opportunities for firms to issue convertible securities at a lower cost than seasoned equity by serving as relatively low-cost distributors of equity exposure. A higher fraction of a convertible is privately placed with hedge funds when institutional ownership, stock liquidity, issue size, concurrent stock repurchases, and limitations on callability suggest that shorting costs will be lower.

Based on a sample of highly leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with Unexpected Snow, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Unexpected Snow provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, allowing them to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks (“liquidity defaulters”) and those that are in distress due to debt overhang (“strategic defaulters”).

We analyze whether risk shifting by a hedge fund manager is related to the manager's incentive contract, personal capital stake, and the risk of fund closure. We find that the propensity to increase risk following poor performance is significantly weaker when incentive pay is tied to the fund's high-water mark and when funds face little immediate risk of liquidation. Risk shifting is also less prevalent when a manager has a significant amount of personal capital invested in the fund. Overall, high-water mark provisions, managerial stake, and low risk of fund closure appear to make a hedge fund manager more conservative with regard to risk shifting. 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 investigates the information content of signals about the identity of investors and their role in price formation. Whereas we document that investors use multiple brokers, broker identity is nevertheless a powerful signal about the identity of investors who initiate trades. The market also correctly processes this signal: the permanent price impact of orders coming from different brokers fits the information profile of the investors associated with these brokers. Our results suggest that an increase in the degree of anonymity may render order flow less informative, which could explain why the literature has documented liquidity improvements in exchanges that reduce transparency.

Institutions often have access to corporate inside information through their connections, but relatively little is known about the extent to which they exploit their informational advantage through short-term trading. We employ broker-level trading data to systematically examine possible cases of connected trading. Despite examining the issue from multiple angles, we are unable to find much evidence to support that investment bank clients take advantage of connections through takeover advising, IPO and SEO underwriting, or lending relationships. In contrast to recent academic literature and popular press, our findings suggest that institutional investors are reluctant to use inside information in traceable manners.

Using institutional investor demand as a proxy for revisions in sophisticated investors' expectations, we test whether financial strength information is gradually impounded over time. Consistent with the gradual incorporation of information, financial strength predicts both future returns and future institutional investor demand. Further consistent with the gradual incorporation of information, more sophisticated transient (high-turnover) institutions respond to financial strength signals prior to less sophisticated, nontransient institutions. A number of additional tests suggest that financial strength forecasts stock returns, at least in part, because it forecasts institutional demand, and institutional demand drives prices.