Knowledge that Transforms

[This article documents the fact that when debtors decide to default on their obligations too early, it is in the creditors' collective interest, as residual claimants, to make concessions prior to forcing a costly liquidation. Symmetrically, when debtors prefer to default at an inefficiently late stage, it is in the creditors' interest to propose a departure from the absolute priority rule. This article develops a continuous time pricing model of dynamic debt restructuring that reflects the crucial influence of the two counterparties' relative bargaining power. Simple and intuitive path-dependent pricing formulae are derived for equity and debt. The debt capacity as well as the evolution of the firm's capital structure throughout its existence is provided.]

[This article presents convenient reduced-form models of the valuation of contingent claims subject to default risk, focusing on applications to the term structure of interest rates for corporate or sovereign bonds. Examples include the valuation of a credit-spread option.]

[We examine the effects of price disclosure on market performance in a continuous experimental multiple-dealer market in which seven professional market makers trade a single security. The dealers trade with one another and with computerized informed and liquidity traders. Our key comparison is between fully public price queues (pretrade transparent market) and bilateral quoting (pretrade opaque). We find that opening spreads are wider and trading volume is lower in the opaque markets due to higher search costs there. More importantly, however, higher search costs also induce more aggressive pricing strategies, so that price discovery is much faster in the opaque markets.]

[This article investigates the long-term equity performance of Japanese firms issuing convertible debt and equity. We find that issuing firms perform poorly (except for equity rights issues) compared to nonissuing firms even though the stock-price reaction to convertible debt and equity issues is not negative for Japanese firms. This underperformance is strongest for firms issuing public convertible debt. In contrast to the United States, poor performance is not concentrated in smaller firms and in firms with a high market-to-book ratio. Simple behavioral explanations advanced for the new issue puzzle in the United States do not seem consistent with the Japanese experience.]

[We investigate adaptive or evolutionary learning in a repeated version of the Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) model. We demonstrate that any process that is a monotonic selection dynamic will converge to the rational expectations asset demands if the proportion of informed traders is fixed. We also show that these learning processes have a unique asymptotically stable fixed point at the Grossman-Stiglitz (GS) equilibrium. The robustness of learning to noisy experimentation is studied using Binmore and Samuelson's (1999) deterministic drift approximation. Conditions on economic and learning process parameters for adaptive learning to lead to the GS rational expectations equilibrium are presented.]

[We account for the relation between stock returns and inflation with two independent disturbances: supply shocks and demand shocks. Supply shocks reflect real output shocks and cause a negative relation between stock returns and inflation, while demand shocks are mainly due to monetary shocks and generate a positive relation between stock returns and inflation. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that the stock return-inflation relation varies over time and across countries, depending on the relative importance of the two types of shocks. Our empirical evidence is based on pre- and postwar periods in the United States, as well as the postwar period in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany.]

[A firm's instantaneous probability of default is modeled as a translated square-root diffusion process modified to allow the process to be correlated with default-free interest rates. The parameters of the process are estimated for 161 firms. An extended Kalman filter approach is used that incorporates both the time-series and cross-sectional (term structure) properties of the individual firms' bond prices. The model is reasonably successful at fitting corporate bond yields, while key features of the term structures of yield spreads are captured in the signs and magnitudes of the resulting parameter estimates.]

[I present evidence of predictability in a sample constructed to minimize concerns about time-varying risk premia and market-microstructure effects. I use filter rules on lagged return and lagged volume information to uncover weekly over-reaction profits on large-capitalization NYSE and AMEX securities. I find that decreasing-volume stocks experience greater reversals. Increasing-volume stocks exhibit weaker reversals and positive autocorrelation. A real-time simulation of the filter strategies suggests that an investor who pursues the filter strategy with relatively low transaction costs will strongly outperform an investor who follows a buy-and-hold strategy.]

[Analysis of absence of arbitrage normally ignores payoffs in states to which the agent assigns zero probability. We extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to the case of "no empty promises" in which the agent cannot promise arbitrarily large payments in some states. There is a superpositive pricing rule that can assign positive price to claims in zero probability states important to the market as well as assigning positive prices to claims in the states of positive probability. With continuous information arrival, no empty promises can be enforced by shutting down the agent's subsequent investments once wealth hits zero.]