Knowledge that Transforms

[We explore the implications of financial system design for financial innovation. We begin with assumptions about the investment opportunities of firms, their observable attributes, and the roles of commercial banks, investment banks, and the financial market. We examine the borrower's choice between bank and financial market funding, the commercial bank's choice of monitoring capacity, and the investment bank's choice of whether to invest in financial innovation. Our main result is that financial innovation in a universal banking system is stochastically lower than innovation in a financial system in which commercial and investment banks are functionally separated.]

Swedish government lottery bonds have coupon payments determined by lottery. They offer a unique opportunity to study a security with uncertain payoffs having a known, observable distribution. The risk associated with the lotteries is idiosyncratic by construction and should not command a risk premium in equilibrium. The bonds are traded in two forms, allowing us to evaluate the rewards to bearing extra lottery risk. Despite its idiosyncratic nature, we find prices appear to reflect aversion to this risk. We evaluate the empirical determinants of this differential pricing and possible explanations for it.

This article examines the relationship between the volatility of the crude oil futures market and changes in initial margin requirements. To closely match changes in futures market volatility with the corresponding changes in margin requirements, we infer the volatility of the futures market from the prices of crude oil futures options contracts. Using a mean-reverting diffusion process for volatility, we show that changes in margin policy do not affect subsequent market volatility.

This article provides a Markov model for the term structure of credit risk spreads. The model is based on Jarrow and Turnbull (1995), with the bankruptcy process following a discrete state space Markov chain in credit ratings. The parameters of this process are easily estimated using observable data. This model is useful for pricing and hedging corporate debt with imbedded options, for pricing and hedging OTC derivatives with counterparty risk, for pricing and hedging (foreign) government bonds subject to default risk (e.g., municipal bonds), for pricing and hedging credit derivatives, and for risk management.

We study the information content of implied volatility from several volatility specifications of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (1992) (HJM) models relative to popular historical volatility models in the Eurodollar options market. The implied volatility from the HJM models explains much of the variation of realized interest rate volatility over both daily and monthly horizons. The implied volatility dominates the GARCH terms, the Glosten et al. (1993) type asymmetric volatility terms, and the interest rate level. However, it cannot explain that the impact of interest rate shocks on the volatility is lower when interest rates are low than when they are high.

[We empirically demonstrate that the opportunities the Boston Stock Exchange and the Cincinnati Stock Exchange offer members to take the other side of their customers' orders through affiliated market makers (to internalize orders) have little short-run effect on posted or effective bid-ask spreads. This is true despite substantial movement of order flow away from the New York Stock Exchange when trading under one of these regional stock exchange programs begins. These results contrast with the adverse effects of market fragmentation and internalization predicted by some theoretical market microstructure analyses and the popular financial press.]

Firms may be financed by their suppliers rather than by financial institutions. There are many theories of trade credit, but few comprehensive empirical tests. This article attempts to fill the gap. We focus on small firms whose access to capital markets may be limited and find evidence suggesting that firms use more trade credit when credit from financial institutions is unavailable. Suppliers lend to constrained firms because they have a comparative advantage in getting information about buyers, they can liquidate assets more efficiently, and they have an implicit equity stake in the firms. Finally, firms with better access to credit offer more trade credit.

We analyze the performance of Japanese open-type stock mutual funds for the 1981–1992 period. The results show that, regardless of the performance measures and benchmarks employed, most of the Japanese mutual funds underperform the benchmarks by between 3.6% and 10.8% per annum. These funds tend to invest more in large stocks with low book-to-market ratios. But this feature does not explain the underperformance. A potential explanation is the dilution effect caused by inflows of funds. In Japan, a new investor of an open-type fund only pays in the after-tax value of the net asset value. We conduct a bootstrap experiment to assess the magnitude of this dilution effect.

The literature on conditional event-study methods criticizes standard event-study procedures as being misspecified if events are voluntary and investors are rational. We argue, however, that standard procedures (1) lead to statistically valid inferences, under conditions described in this article; and (2) are often a superior means of inference, even when event-study data are generated exactly as per a class of rational expectations specifications introduced by the conditional methods literature. Our results provide an equilibrium justification for traditional event-study methods, and we suggest how these simple procedures may be combined with conditional methods to improve statistical power in event studies.

If banks have an informational monopoly about their clients, borrowers may curtail their effort level for fear of being exploited via high interest rates in the future. Banks can correct this incentive problem by committing to share private information with other lenders. The fiercer competition triggered by information sharing lowers future interest rates and future profits of banks. But, provided banks retain an initial informational advantage, their current profits are raised by the borrowers' higher effort. This trade-off determines the banks' willingness to share information. Their decision affects credit market competition, interest rates, volume of lending, and social welfare.