We use a simple model to outline the conditions under which corporate investment is sensitive to nonfundamental movements in stock prices. The key prediction is that stock prices have a stronger impact on the investment of “equity-dependent” firms—firms that need external equity to finance marginal investments. Using an index of equity dependence based on the work of Kaplan and Zingales, we find support for this hypothesis. In particular, firms that rank in the top quintile of the KZ index have investment that is almost three times as sensitive to stock prices as firms in the bottom quintile.

This paper proposes a framework for corporate security valuation based on path-dependent, barrier option models instead of the commonly used path-independent approach. We argue that path dependency is an intrinsic and fundamental characteristic of corporate securities because equity can be knocked out whenever a legally binding barrier is breached. A direct implication of this framework is that equity will be priced as a down-and-out call option. We provide empirical validation of the barrier model by showing that implied barriers are statistically and economically significant for a large cross-section of industrial firms. Additional robustness tests confirm that barriers remain significant over a wide range of input variable estimates. And finally, we apply the barrier option framework to bankruptcy prediction and find that implied failure probabilities dominate Z-scores in most cases.

We investigate whether corporate executives’ stock repurchase decisions are affected by their incentives to manage diluted earning per share (EPS). We find that executives increase the level of their firms’ stock repurchases when: (1) the dilutive effect of outstanding employee stock options (ESOs) on diluted EPS increases, and (2) earnings are below the level required to achieve the desired rate of EPS growth. We also find that executives’ repurchase decisions are not associated with actual ESO exercises, suggesting that they are driven by incentives to manage diluted but not basic EPS, and strengthening our earnings management interpretation.

We examine the effects of trading after hours on the amount and timing of price discovery over the 24-hour day. A high volume of liquidity trade facilitates price discovery. Thus prices are more efficient and more information is revealed per hour during the trading day than after hours. However, the low trading volume after hours generates significant, albeit inefficient, price discovery. Individual trades contain more information after hours than during the day. Because information asymmetry declines over the day, price changes are larger, reflect more private information, and are less noisy before the open than after the close.

Using a cash flow-based framework, we decompose exchange rate into short-term and long-term elements for 105 individual US banks over 1988–1998. We show that significant long-term exposure is more prevalent than significant short-term exposure, reflecting the difficulty in recognizing, modeling, and managing the longer-term effects of exchange rate risk. Our analyses reveal that 72% of internationally oriented and 88% of domestically oriented banks in the sample have significant exposure to at least one of five currency pairs. This result supports the theory that domestic banks are exposed and should be concerned about the indirect impact of exchange rate risk. Furthermore, we provide some evidence that economies of scale may exist for institutions with extensive international operations.

This paper utilises the non-parametric frontier approach, data envelopment analysis, to analyse the technical and scale efficiency in Japanese banking using a recent cross-section sample. Efficiency analysis is conducted across individual banks, bank types and bank size groups. Following Berger and Humphrey [Eur. J. Oper. Res. 98 (1997) 175], problem loans are controlled for as an exogenous influence on bank efficiency. Powerful size-efficiency relationships are established with respect to both technical and scale efficiency. Furthermore, the logic of the recent large-scale merger wave in Japan is questioned as the larger (City) banks are generally found to be operating above the minimum efficient scale and to have limited opportunity to gain from eliminating X-inefficiencies. The opposite result is found for the smaller banks. Finally, the results suggest that controlling for the exogenous impact of problem loans is important in Japanese banking, especially for the smaller regional banks.

This study examines individual behavior in two well-functioning marketplaces to investigate whether market experience eliminates the endowment effect. Field evidence from both markets suggests that individual behavior converges to the neoclassical prediction as market experience increases. In an experimental test of whether these observations are due to treatment (market experience) or selection (e.g., static preferences), I find that market experience plays a significant role in eliminating the endowment effect. I also find that these results are robust to institutional change and extend beyond the two marketplaces studied. Overall, this study provides strong evidence that market experience eliminates an important market anomaly.

Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers that have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes. The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages by 3 to 4 percent.

Using a sample of 1,560 new debt financings, we examine the choice among bank debt, non-bank private debt, and public debt. The primary determinant of the debt source is the credit quality of the issuer. Firms with the highest credit quality borrow from public sources, firms with medium credit quality borrow from banks, and firms with the lowest credit quality borrow from non-bank private lenders. Non-bank private debt thus plays a unique role in accommodating the financing needs of firms with low credit quality. In addition, the choice of debt source is (weakly) influenced by managerial discretion.

Researchers and practitioners in accounting and finance often investigate or advocate particular disciplined trading strategies, but little work investigates the determinants of individual investors' trading‐strategy reliance. We report two experiments, which provide evidence that the dual‐source model of overconfidence (Sniezek and Buckley [1991]) predicts the circumstances in which investors are more likely to rely on disciplined trading strategies. Our results indicate that reliance is more likely when investors trade portfolios of securities rather than trading on a case‐by‐case basis, particularly when investors have received feedback that their previous (unaided) trading decisions have been unprofitable. These results are driven by the number of shares that investors transact rather than by investors' directional agreement with the recommendations of the trading strategy, suggesting that the effects of a portfolio approach and trading experience occur by mitigating investors' overconfidence. The effects violate an aspect of economic rationality because our experiments ensure that investors in all conditions trade the same set of securities based on the same set of information.