Knowledge that Transforms

This research examines the effect of product market threats on firms’ leverage adjustments. We find that competitive pressures from the product market accelerate the leverage speed of adjustment (SOA) toward the target capital structure. To establish the causal effect of competitive threats on SOA, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment provided by large import tariff reductions in the U.S. manufacturing sector and show a significant increase in firms’ leverage adjustments after large tariff cuts. The impact of product market threats on leverage adjustments is more pronounced for firms with poor governance quality and exposed to product market threats. Finally, to the extent that reaching the target capital structure enhances firm value, we note that the faster SOA following competition translates into higher firm value. Overall, our study highlights the “bright side” of product market competition and suggests that agency conflicts between managers and shareholders are attenuated by intensified competition.

Using a unique panel design that enables to control for bank, firm, market and loan heterogeneities, we confirm that relationship lenders charge higher rates in good times and lower rates in bad times. However, we show that risky single-bank firms do not benefit from this insurance mechanism and are “held-up” by relationship lenders. Local bank competition and higher non-bank finance dependence alleviate this information-monopolistic behavior. Finally, long-term loans and small, non-trading-oriented and well-capitalized banks drive the benefits of relationship lending.

We study quantitatively how uncertainty in expected stock return predictability affects life-cycle portfolio choice and wealth accumulation in the presence of undiversifiable labor income risk. Households filter information about future expected returns from observed predictors and realized stock returns. Therefore, optimal portfolio choice does not only depend on financial wealth and age, as in more traditional life-cycle models. Counterfactuals demonstrate the magnitude of portfolio demand changes that depend on perceptions about underlying expected returns. On average, life-cycle asset allocation becomes more conservative than models with either i.i.d. stock returns, or with clearer signals about expected stock returns.

Recent empirical studies argue that passive funds tend to propagate liquidity shocks to the underlying securities, thus increasing stock volatility. We document that the growing importance of the closing auction has caused trading in ETFs, much like trading in the underlying stocks, to shift significantly towards the Close. Motivated by this result, we use intraday data to analyse the relation between passive ownership and stock price dynamics. The main conclusion is that the effect is concentrated at the end of the continuous trading session and at the Close. This is arguably due to the concentration of portfolio trades in the order flow during that phase. We find that among US stocks, a two standard deviation increase in ETF ownership would generate a 2.99% relative increase in volatility for the median stock near the Close. In contrast, we find little evidence that prices of passively held securities are more volatile at the beginning of the trading session.

While the gains to acquirers in public mergers and aquisitions (M&A) tend to be small or non-existent, acquirers of unlisted targets have been a notable, robust exception. Prior studies often point to an illiquidity discount as the reason why these non-public targets are good deals for acquirers. This paper examines acquirer wealth gains and bid premia in M&A involving unlisted/listed firms over the past three decades. Our findings show that, while target listing status was a significant determinant of acquirer wealth gains and bid premium in early years, it no longer has significant shareholder wealth implications for either acquirers or targets in M&A. These results are consistent with recent studies that suggest a changing landscape in the public funding markets and an increased availability of alternative funding sources for unlisted firms.

Reference rates like LIBOR were designed to reflect banks’ full cost of funds, including credit premia. With publication of LIBOR expected to cease soon, regulators have recommended a shift to risk-free reference rates. To study the implications of this shift, this paper develops a tractable model of bank lending and hedging in which the design of reference rates shapes the allocation of risk in equilibrium. Reference rates that capture credit risk, but are sufficiently free from manipulation, could improve welfare relative to risk-free reference rates. It remains an open question whether such reference rates can be constructed.

Using an international sample of IPO firms from 36 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we find strong evidence that societal trust is negatively associated with the degree of IPO underpricing. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of societal trust in reducing IPO underpricing is more pronounced when the information environment is less transparent, when the stock market environment is less robust, and when legal institutions are weaker, settings where the effect of trust is likely to be more salient. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that an informal institution such as societal trust has an important and consistent influence on international IPO underpricing.

We propose an aggregate 52-week high ratio (AH52) to proxy for scarcity of investor attention and show that AH52 positively predicts future momentum profits. The momentum strategy is profitable as one standard deviation increase in AH52 raises momentum profits by 0.90% per month. AH52 subsumes the predictive power of well-documented market state variables such as market illiquidity, market volatility, and down market state. A timing strategy based on AH52 exhibits a higher annualized Sharpe ratio than that of a passive buy-and-hold strategy. The predictive power of AH52 is robust across market capitalizations, sub-periods, alternative measures of aggregate 52-week high, G7 countries, the inclusion of market-wide information, and various momentum strategies.

We examine the impact of blockholder board representation on a borrower's bank loan contract terms and find it is associated with lower spreads and fewer negative covenants. When examining the potential channels behind the relationship, we find that blockholder-directors who take dedicated monitoring roles, as opposed to the short-term or confrontational positions often associated with activist shareholders, drive the overall relationship. The findings, which are robust to alternative model specifications and explanations, suggest that blockholder-directors can serve as substitute monitors to debtholders when their incentives are aligned. The results also highlight the heterogeneity among blockholders who actively influence the management process.

We analytically compare two dominant methodologies for the construction of an ESG factor: the time-series (ratings used to sort stocks) and cross-sectional (ratings used to weight stocks) approaches. Differences in ESG rating and exposure to other firm characteristics imply an ex ante expected return spread between the two factors. We construct a cross-sectional factor (i) featuring a targeted rating, thus allowing comparability with other factors, (ii) neutralizing exposure to other firm characteristics, and (iii) not harming diversification through stock screening. Using ratings from several data vendors, we document strong variations of the factor alpha in the time series and across vendors. The conditional alpha is negatively related to the level of media attention for ESG and positively related to variations in media attention.