Knowledge that Transforms

[A change of numeraire argument is used to derive a general option parity, or equivalence, result relating American call and put prices, and to obtain new expressions for futures and forward prices. The general parity result unifies and extends a number of existing results. The new futures and forward pricing formulas are often simpler to compute in multifactor models than existing alternatives. We also extend previous work by deriving a general formula relating exchange options to ordinary call options. A number of applications to diffusion models, including stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rate, and stochastic dividend rate models, and jump-diffusion models are examined.]

[This article presents a new definition of market completeness that is independent of the notions of no arbitrage and equivalent martingale measures. Our definition has many advantages, all shown herein. First, it preserves the Second Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, even in complex economies. Second, under our definition, the market can be complete yet arbitrage opportunities exist. This is important in practice, and stands in contrast to the traditional definitions. Third, under the assumption of no arbitrage and when used in the standard models, our definition is equivalent to the traditional one.]

[Transaction costs are important for a host of empirical analyses from market efficiency to international market research. But transaction costs estimates are not always available, or where available, are cumbersome to use and expensive to purchase. We present a model that requires only the time series of daily security returns to endogenously estimate the effective transaction costs for any firm, exchange, or time period. The feature of the data that allows for the estimation of transaction costs is the incidence of zero returns. Incorporating zero returns in the return-generating process, the model provides continuous estimates of average round-trip transaction costs from 1963 to 1990 that are 1.2% and 10.3% for large and small decile firms, respectively. These estimates are highly correlated (85%), with the most commonly used transaction cost estimators.]

[This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreads in the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competition primarily by the number of dealers active in the market and find that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition, even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expected level of competition is time varying, highly predictable, and displays a strong seasonal component that in part is induced by geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hour trading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition of one more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by 1.7%.]

[This article shows that introducing derivative assets increases incentives to collect information about asset payoffs. The increase in information collection makes the price of the underlying asset more informative and causes the expected price to increase. Extending the model to a dynamic setting with multiple risky assets, we find that introducing derivative assets for one asset increases the expected prices of positively correlated assets and reduces price reaction to future earnings announcements. These findings are consistent with the bulk of the empirical evidence on the relationship between the introduction of derivative assets and the behavior of asset prices.]

[This article analyzes the problem facing an agent who has a long-term commodity supply commitment and who wishes to hedge that commitment using short-maturity commodity futures contracts. As time evolves, the agent has to roll the hedge as old futures contracts mature and new futures contracts are listed. This gives rise to hedge errors. The optimal hedging strategy is characterized in a world where contracts of several different maturities coexist. The strategy is independent both of the agent's risk aversion and, under certain conditions, of beliefs about expected returns from holding futures contracts. The methodology is compared with approaches based on dynamic models of the term structure. It is tested on data from the oil futures market.]

[We study the precursors and outcomes of refocusing episodes by 107 diversified firms that were not taken over between 1984 and 1993. These firms had more value-reducing diversification policies than diversified firms that did not refocus. However, major disciplinary or incentive-altering events (including management turnover, outside shareholder pressure, changes in management compensation, and financial distress) usually occurred before refocusing took place. The cumulative abnormal returns over a firm's refocusing-related announcements averaged 7.3% and were significantly related to the amount of value reduction associated with the refocuser's diversification policy.]

[Brokerage analysts frequently comment on and sometimes recommend companies that their firms have recently taken public. We show that stocks that under-writer analysts recommend perform more poorly than "buy" recommendations by unaffiliated brokers prior to, at the time of, and subsequent to the recommendation date. We conclude that the recommendations by underwriter analysts show significant evidence of bias. We show also that the market does not recognize the full extent of this bias. The results suggest a potential conflict of interest inherent in the different functions that investment bankers perform.]

[In contrast to previous literature, we argue that there are two types of poorly performing firms going private through a leveraged buyout (LBO). One group consists of firms in which managers own an insignificant fraction of their firm's stock and are vulnerable to a hostile takeover. The other group consists of firms in which managers own a significant fraction of their firm's stock and so face little risk of hostile takeover. Our evidence indicates that there are two such groups of LBOs and that their motivations and posttransaction actions are different.]