Knowledge that Transforms

We study the evolution of social distance among economists over the period 1970–2000. While the number of economists has more than doubled, the distance between them, which was already small, has declined significantly. The key to understanding the short average distances is the observation that economics is spanned by a collection of interlinked stars. A star is an economist who writes with many other economists, most of whom have few coauthors and generally do not write with each other.

We study indirect democracy in which countries, states, or districts each elect a representative who later votes at a union level on their behalf. We show that the voting rule that maximizes the total expected utility of all agents in the union involves assigning a weight to each district’s vote and then sticking with the status quo unless at least a threshold of weighted votes is cast for change. We analyze how the weights relate to the population size of a country and the correlation structure of agents’ preferences, and then we compare the voting weights in the Council of the European Union under the Nice Treaty and the recently proposed Constitution.

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation in which firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. Monopoly power is a scarce resource to be allocated across innovators who arrive at various times. The optimal assignment of property rights must counterbalance the incentives of current and future innovators. The resulting mechanism resembles a menu of patents that have infinite duration and fixed scope. This optimal patent menu can be implemented with a simple buyout scheme: The innovator commits at the outset to a price ceiling at which he will sell his rights to a future inventor. When a larger fee is paid initially, a higher price ceiling is obtained. Any subsequent innovator must pay this price and purchase his own buyout fee contract. We relate this mechanism to the proposed compulsory licensing schemes.

We examine how analysts respond to public information when setting stock recommendations. We model the determinants of analysts' recommendation changes following large stock price movements. We find evidence of an asymmetry following large positive and negative returns. Following large stock price increases, analysts are equally likely to upgrade or downgrade. Following large stock price declines, analysts are more likely to downgrade. This asymmetry exists after accounting for investment banking relationships and herding behavior. This result suggests recommendation changes are “sticky” in one direction, with analysts reluctant to downgrade. Moreover, this result implies that analysts' optimistic bias may vary through time.

Equity ownership gives labor both a fractional stake in a firm's residual cash flows and a voice in corporate governance. Relative to other firms, labor-controlled publicly traded firms deviate more from value maximization, invest less in long-term assets, take fewer risks, grow more slowly, create fewer new jobs, and exhibit lower labor and total factor productivity. Therefore, we propose that labor uses its corporate governance voice to maximize the combined value of its contractual and residual claims, and that this often pushes corporate policies away from, rather than toward, shareholder value maximization.

We study IPO pricing in Germany to determine whether when-issued trading provides information that is useful for setting IPO offer prices, and whether such trading supplants bookbuilding as a source of information. We find that when-issued trading reveals relevant information for pricing IPOs, and that, once when-issued trading has begun, bookbuilding is not a source of costly information for pricing. But bookbuilding does not appear to be fully supplanted as a source of pricing information. We find evidence consistent with bookbuilding being used to gather information prior to the onset of when-issued trading.

We study securities market models with fixed costs. We first characterize the absence of arbitrage opportunities and provide fair pricing rules. We then apply these results to extend some popular interest rate and option pricing models that present arbitrage opportunities in the absence of fixed costs. In particular, we prove that the quite striking result obtained by Dybvig, Ingersoll, and Ross (1996), which asserts that under the assumption of absence of arbitrage long zero-coupon rates can never fall, is no longer true in models with fixed costs, even arbitrarily small fixed costs. For instance, models in which the long-term rate follows a diffusion process are arbitrage-free in the presence of fixed costs (including arbitrarily small fixed costs). We also rationalize models with partially absorbing or reflecting barriers on the price processes. We propose a version of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) model which, consistent with Longstaff (1992), produces yield curves with realistic humps, but does not assume an absorbing barrier for the short-term rate. This is made possible by the presence of (even arbitrarily small) fixed costs.

This study provides further evidence of earnings management around security offerings. We find positive and significant discretionary current accruals coincident with offerings of reverse LBOs. Issuers in the most aggressive quartile of earnings management have a one-year aftermarket return that is between 15% and 25% less than the most conservative quartile. We also find a negative and significant relation between abnormal accruals and post-issue abnormal returns within the first year after the offering. The relation remains after controlling for book-to-market ratio, firm size, offering size, and involvement of buyout specialists or management. Although earnings management has been used to explain post-issue long-term underperformance of IPOs and SEOs, our study shows that earnings management can explain post-offering returns of reverse LBOs, even in the absence of post-offering underperformance.

We analyze allocations to institutional and retail investors in 441 initial public offerings (IPOs). In addition to the well-known favorable first-day returns, we show that institutions also obtain more allocations in IPOs with better long-term performance. We find that initial institutional flips help predict future returns, suggesting that at least some institutions retain valuable private information about IPO firms. Collectively, these findings illustrate the importance of aftermarket relations between underwriters and investors and that underwriters have discretionary means to compensate IPO investors beyond first-day returns and price stabilization.

We analyze the price reaction to analysts' revisions by testing the Griffin and Tversky (1992) hypothesis that agents place emphasis on the strength of the signal (the dramatic nature of the event) and may de-emphasize the weight (the ability of the analyst making the recommendation). Two attributes, namely, years of experience and the reputation of the analysts' brokerage houses form proxies for analyst ability (or weight) that we validate by documenting that revisions by high ability analysts outperform those by low ability ones. We find evidence of return persistence following small (low strength) revisions by high ability analysts and the opposite return pattern following large (high strength) revisions of low ability analysts, consistent with the arguments of Griffin and Tversky (1992). Our study provides an empirical link between evidence on individual decision making and stock market returns, and also helps promote an understanding of the analyst industry as well as its interaction with the investing population.