Knowledge that Transforms

We study the signaling content of managers' dividend decisions for 145 NYSE firms whose annual earnings decline after nine or more consecutive years of growth. Using a variety of model specifications and definitions of favorable dividend signals, we find virtually no support for the notion that dividend decisions help identify firms with superior future earnings. Dividends tend not to be reliable signals because (i) a behavioral bias (overoptimism) leads managers to overestimate future earnings when growth prospects fade; and (ii) managers make only modest cash commitments when they increase dividends, undermining the reliability of such signals.

We report that 34% of targets of unsuccessful control contents between 1983 and 1989 experience a change in top manager within two years following the contest. Management turnover is concentrated among poorly performing firms in which outside blockholders acquire an ownership stake. These blockholders appear to facilitate post-contest asset restructurings that increase the value of the target and improve operating performance. In the absence of an outsider blockholder, managers typically retain their positions despite poor pre-contest performance and the use of value-reducing defensive tactics during the control contest. We conclude that monitoring by active outside investors facilitates valuable internal control efforts.

This paper presents an equilibrium model of the term structure of interest rates when investors have heterogeneous preferences. The basic model considers a pure exchange economy of two classes of investors with different (but constant) relative risk aversion and gives closed-form solutions to bond prices. I use the model to examine the effect of preference heterogeneity on the behavior of bond yields. The model is also extended to cases of more than two classes of investors.

When commercial banks make loans to firms and also underwrite securities, does this hamper or enhance their role as certifiers of firm value? This paper examines empirically the pricing of bank-underwritten securities as compared to investment-house-underwritten securities over a unique period in the U.S. (pre-Glass-Steagall) when both banks and investment houses were allowed to underwrite securities. The evidence shows that investors were willing to pay higher prices for securities underwritten by banks rather than investment houses. The results support a certification role for banks, which is more valuable for junior and information sensitive securities.

We show that there is a negative relation between leverage and future growth at the firm level and, for diversified firms, at the business segment level. This negative relation between leverage and growth holds for firms with low Tobin's q ratio, but not for high-q firms or firms in high-q industries. Therefore, leverage does not reduce growth for firms known to have good investment opportunities, but is negatively related to growth for firms whose growth opportunities are either not recognized by the capital markets or are not sufficiently valuable to overcome the effects of their debt overhang.

Stock splits should have no effect on firm value in perfect capital markets, yet stock prices increase on split announcements. The two traditional explanations are information signaling and improved liquidity for shares that trade at lower prices. We investigate these explanations by studying splits of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) that are not associated with splits in their home-country stock, and which represent unique illustrations of the effect of liquidity. We interpret our findings as supportive of the liquidity explanation of stock split announcement effects.

We test the pecking order model of capital structure by examining the financing of firms that went public in 1983. We estimate a logit to predict external financing, and a multinomial logit to predict the type of financing using data on the IPO firms' security offerings during 1984–1992. Our results indicate that the probability of obtaining external funds is unrelated to the shortfall in internally generated funds, although firms with cash surpluses avoid external financing. Firms that access the capital markets do not follow the pecking order when choosing the type of security to offer.

This paper investigates the ability of the pecking-order model, the agency model, and the timing model to explain firms' decisions whether to issue debt or equity, the shock price reaction to their decisions and their actions afterward. We find strong support for the agency model. Firms often depart from the pecking order because of agency considerations. We fail to find support for the timing model.

Most sports teams play as either the favorite or the underdog and either at home or away. The failure to recognize the symmetric and interdependent relations between these characteristics has led previous researchers to use potentially biased methods to test for rationality and efficiency in football betting markets and thus to reach inappropriate conclusions. We develop a more general specification, which also incorporates ‘pick-em’ games and games played on neutral sites, and find little or no evidence against market efficiency in the NFL and college betting markets for regular season games. We do, however, uncover evidence of biased betting lines for Superbowls.

We investigate whether investors price the option to abandon a firm at its exit value. Theory prices this real option as an American put with both a stochastic strike price (exit value) and a stochastic value of the underlying security (the value of cash flows). The empirical implications are that firm value increases in exit value, after controlling for expected going-concern cash flows, and that more generalizable assets produce more abandonment option value. Using discounted earnings forecasts to proxy for expected cash flows and prior literature to categorize asset generalizability, we find strong support for the predictions of abandonment option theory.