We examine how the financial constraints of repurchasing firms affect their post-buyback performance. By every constraint measure we use, a set of constrained firms repurchase. They display significantly poorer post-buyback abnormal return and operating performance than unconstrained firms. Financial constraints are more important in explaining the performance of share buybacks for firms with high actual repurchase ratios. Constrained firms, especially those with high actual repurchase ratios, experience a significantly greater increase in post-buyback distress risk than unconstrained firms. Managerial hubris could explain why constrained firms buy back shares even if the buybacks do not improve shareholder wealth.

Checking parameter stability of econometric models is a long-standing problem. Almost all existing structural change tests in econometrics are designed to detect abrupt breaks. Little attention has been paid to smooth structural changes, which may be more realistic in economics. We propose a consistent test for smooth structural changes as well as abrupt structural breaks with known or unknown change points. The idea is to estimate smooth time-varying parameters by local smoothing and compare the fitted values of the restricted constant parameter model and the unrestricted time-varying parameter model. The test is asymptotically pivotal and does not require prior information about the alternative. A simulation study highlights the merits of the proposed test relative to a variety of popular tests for structural changes. In an application, we strongly reject the stability of univariate and multivariate stock return prediction models in the postwar and post-oil-shocks periods.

In this paper we investigate the effects of informed trading (PIN) and information uncertainty in determining price momentum. We find that trading strategies based on buying high-uncertainty good-news stocks and shorting high-uncertainty bad-news stocks work well when limited to high-PIN stocks, while stocks with low-PIN do not exhibit price continuations, even when the uncertainty level of those stocks is high. In contrast, momentum returns are always significant for high-PIN stocks, irrespective of information uncertainty. Overall, we show that the informed trading effect is both independent of and stronger than that of information uncertainty in determining price momentum.

This paper examines the implications of market microstructure for foreign exchange markets. We argue that the usual order flow model needs to be recast in broader terms to incorporate the transaction costs of liquidity and the limitation of price discovery through order flows that involve low trading density currencies. Using a daily data set, we find that order flows are inadequate when it comes to explaining the changes in the low trading density currencies. Alternatively, within the high trading density, both order flows and bid–ask spreads significantly affect the foreign exchange rate returns. Our findings suggest that the order flow model is better at incorporating these microstructure effects except for some currencies with a very high level of trading density.

Variation in idiosyncratic return volatility from 1978 to 2009 is attributable to discretionary accrual volatility and the correlation between premanaged earnings and discretionary accruals reflective of information quality across firms. These results are robust to controls for firm operating uncertainty, growth options, business-cycle variations, and firm age and industry effects, and they highlight the importance of managerial discretion in determining idiosyncratic volatility.

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley.

Recent studies in the law and finance literature have shown that property rights protection is central to corporate financing and investment decisions and economic growth at large. We extend this literature by examining the effect of property rights security on corporate risk management decisions — an important element of a firm's business strategy. Using a unique dataset covering over 55,000 Chinese firms and employing both institution- and firm-level measures of property rights security, we find that secure property rights lead to higher corporate demand for property insurance, suggesting that property rights security is an important determinant of corporate risk management decisions. The effect of property rights protection on insurance consumption is also validated by a cross-country analysis that uses data from 93 countries over the period 1995–2008. Our study sheds light on the importance of property rights protection to corporate risk management decisions.

In many credit risk and pricing applications, credit transition matrix is modeled by a constant transition probability or generator matrix for Markov processes. Based on empirical evidence, we model rating transition processes as piecewise homogeneous Markov chains with unobserved structural breaks. The proposed model provides explicit formulas for the posterior distribution of the time-varying rating transition generator matrices, the probability of structural break at each period and prediction of transition matrices in the presence of possible structural breaks. Estimating the model by credit rating history, we show that the structural break in rating transitions can be captured by the proposed model. We also show that structural breaks in rating dynamics are different for different industries. We then compare the prediction performance of the proposed and time-homogeneous Markov chain models.

This paper reexamines the explanatory power of Taylor rule fundamentals for real exchange rate determination. We assume the agents know the time-varying parameters in central bank policy rules. The empirical results suggest that a monetary policy rule with regime switching is better able to explain the real Deutschemark/dollar exchange rate from 1976 to 1998 compared with a fixed-regime monetary policy rule. The findings show the importance of accounting for the expectation formation effect in changing policy rules as emphasized by the Lucas critique. Ignoring these effects can undermine the value of the rational expectations models.