Knowledge that Transforms

There is a global trend in initial public offerings toward the increased use of book building. Relative to other methods such as auctions, a key feature of book building is that the underwriter has total discretion in allocating shares, allowing allocations to be based on long-term relationships between underwriters and investors. In a multiperiod model with endogenous (and costly) information acquisition, I show that the underwriter's ability to lower underpricing depends largely on its ability to favor regular uninformed investors. One implication is that the hybrid book building/open offer method, which is becoming increasingly popular internationally, will lead to higher underpricing than straight book building.

We examine the extent to which an investor's tastes and beliefs can be jointly recovered from knowledge of his/her consumption choice. More precisely, we assume that the investor's preferences admit an expected utility representation, but with subjective (unknown) probabilities, and investigate what joint restrictions can be placed on utility functions and beliefs. If the investor draws utility from intertemporal consumption, we show that the set of utility functions and beliefs that are consistent with a given consumption choice can be characterized by a martingale condition. In the Markovian case, this characterization can be restated in terms of a Riccati differential equation that must be satisfied by the investor's relative risk aversion function. To each solution of this differential equation is associated a unique utility function and a unique set of beliefs supporting the given consumption choice. Moreover, we show that the differential equation has at most one solution in the class of utility functions displaying infinite absolute risk aversion at the origin. Thus, preferences (and associated beliefs) can be uniquely recovered within this class.

We examine how certain firm- and market-specific characteristics affect incumbent firms' responses to new entry into their local markets. Data comes from the discount department store industry where Wal-Mart entered a large number of markets in a short period of time. Consistent with existing research, larger and more profitable incumbents respond more aggressively to Wal-Mart's entry, while more highly levered incumbents respond less aggressively. Also, there is evidence that incumbent managers fight harder (possibly overinvest) when their job is at greater risk and high managerial ownership appears to reduce this agency problem. Incumbent firms behave differently in markets under attack by Wal-Mart than in markets not yet threatened, suggesting that some of the documented responses are specific to Wal-Mart's entry.

We analyze the incentives of investment banks to develop innovative products. We show that client characteristics and market structure affect these incentives significantly. Investment banks with larger market shares have greater incentives to innovate and smaller banks are likely to share their innovations with the largest bank. Innovation incentives increase in volatile environments and regulatory scrutiny actually encourages loophole exploitation activity. Our predictions are consistent with stylized facts and the analysis has broad testable implications for innovative activity in other markets similarly characterized by a lack of comprehensive protection for intellectual property rights, for example, the software industry.

Opening mechanisms play a crucial role in information aggregation following the overnight nontrading period. This article examines the process of price discovery at the New York Stock Exchange single-price opening auction. We develop a theoretical model to explain the determinants of the opening price and test the model using order-level data. We show that the presence of designated dealers facilitates price discovery relative to a fully automated call auction market. This is consistent with specialists extracting information from observing the evolution of the limit order book. In addition, the specialist's opening trade reflects noninformational factors such as price stabilization requirements.

This study examines the behavior of spreads paid in firm underwritten seasoned common stock offerings and straight bond offerings. Estimates indicate that up to 85% of the spread is variable cost and that the marginal spread is rising. Further, offerings that are likely to require greater underwriting services encounter higher marginal spreads. These findings are consistent with there being a family of U-shaped spreads, with lower quality offerings priced on higher spreads, unlike the economies of scale view of spreads. They agree with the views that underwriters provide valuable services and that the marginal cost of external finance is rising.

This article develops a model of spread and depth setting under asymmetric information where the equilibrium depth is proportionally more sensitive than the spread to changes in the degree of information asymmetry. The analysis uses a one-period model in which a risk-neutral, monopolistic market maker faces a price-sensitive liquidity trader and a better informed trader who is alternatively risk neutral and risk averse. The equilibrium depth can take values ranging from 0 to infinity, depending on the information asymmetry, the asset volatility, and the strength of the liquidity demand, while the spread remains positive and finite.

This article develops a general equilibrium, continuous time model where portfolio constraints generate mispricing between redundant securities. Constrained consumption-portfolio optimization techniques are adapted to incorporate redundant, possibly mispriced securities. Under logarithmic preferences, we provide explicit conditions for mispricing and closed-form expressions for all economic quantities. Existence of an equilibrium where mispricing occurs with positive probability is verified in a specific case. In a more general setting, we demonstrate the necessity of mispricing for equilibrium when agents are heterogeneous enough. The construction of a representative agent with stochastic weights allows us to characterize prices and allocations, given mispricing occurs.

It appears that volatility in equity markets is asymmetric: returns and conditional volatility are negatively correlated. We provide a unified framework to simultaneously investigate asymmetric volatility at the firm and the market level and to examine two potential explanations of the asymmetry: leverage effects and volatility feedback. Our empirical application uses the market portfolio and portfolios with different leverage constructed from Nikkei 225 stocks. We reject the pure leverage model of Christie (1982) and find support for a volatility feedback story. Volatility feedback at the firm level is enhanced by strong asymmetries in conditional covariances. Conditional betas do not show significant asymmetries. We document the risk premium implications of these findings.

Over the past decade several countries, including the US, have introduced or redesigned legislation that confers priority in bankruptcy upon all or some bank deposits. We argue that in the presence of contracting costs such rules can increase efficiency. We first show in a private information model that a borrower can reduce overall costs of finance by letting informationally heterogeneous lenders choose between junior and senior debt. In particular, we find that debt priorities reduce socially wasteful information gathering by investors. We then argue why, particularly in banking, legal standardization of debt priorities may be superior to bilateral private arrangements.