This paper extends the investigation of the effect of managerial motives on hedging policy. I utilize a proxy variable that incorporates CEO incentives to increase risk relative to incentives to increase stock price. The variable is directly measured using observed characteristics of CEO portfolios of stock and option holdings. Furthermore, CEO risk-taking incentives are modeled as a choice variable to eliminate the simultaneity bias of modeling risk-taking incentives as an exogenous variable. If modeled as a simultaneous system of equations, a strong negative link between CEO risk-taking incentives and the amount of derivative holdings exists. This result is consistent with the notion that derivatives are used for hedging purposes. Both the characteristics of stock and option holdings are important in determining cross-sectional differences in corporate derivative holdings.

Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.

This paper examines the effect of inflation on stock valuations and expected long-run returns. Ex ante estimates of expected long-run returns are constructed by incorporating analysts' earnings forecasts into a variant of the Campbell-Shiller dividend-price ratio model. The negative relation between equity valuations and expected inflation is found to be the result of two effects: a rise in expected inflation coincides with both lower expected real earnings growth and higher required real returns. The earnings channel mostly reflects a negative relation between expected long-term earnings growth and expected inflation. The effect of expected inflation on required (long-run) real stock returns is also substantial. An increase of one percentage point in expected inflation is estimated to raise required real stock returns about one percentage point, which on average would imply a 20% decline in stock prices. But the inflation factor in expected real stock returns is also in long-term Treasury yields; consequently, expected inflation has little effect on the long-run equity premium.

To quantify the implications of common currencies for trade and income, we use data for over 200 countries and dependencies. In our two-stage approach, estimates at the first stage suggest that belonging to a currency union/board triples trade with other currency union members. Moreover, there is no evidence of trade-diversion. Our estimates at the second stage suggest that every one percent increase in a country’s overall trade (relative to GDP) raises income per capita by at least one third of a percent. We combine the two estimates to quantify the effect of common currencies on output. Our results support the hypothesis that important beneficial effects of currency unions come through the promotion of trade.

This paper analyzes annual corporate governance decisions at firms making initial public offerings (IPOs) of common stock between 1996 and 1999. Our objective is to examine relations between firms’ corporate governance decisions and the informativeness of available measures of managerial performance. We consider financial measures such as earnings and stock return, as well as direct monitoring. We collect a sample of IPO firms from the manufacturing, Internet, and technology (non‐Internet) industries, and examine how the use of various performance measures in annual compensation grants and turnover decisions varies with the information environment of the firm and with the extent of venture capital influence. Consistent with prior research that finds earnings are of limited usefulness in firm valuation for Internet firms, we find Internet firms place less importance on earnings and greater importance on stock returns in determining compensation grants than do non‐Internet firms. We also find that compensation grants of firms with little or no venture capital influence display significantly stronger association with accounting and stock performance measures than those of firms with more intense monitoring by venture capitalists. This result is consistent with direct monitoring and the use of explicit performance measures acting as substitute governance mechanisms.

Business executives and academics frequently criticize budget-based compensation plans as providing incentives for subordinates to build slack into proposed budgets. In this paper, we examine whether either of two practices—using budgets to allocate scarce resources, or providing information about co-workers—reduces budget slack and increases subordinate performance when organizations use budgets for performance evaluation. The results from our experiment show that using budgets for both resource allocation and performance evaluation not only eliminates budget slack, but also increases subordinates' effort and task performance. Additionally, we find that an internal reporting system that provides information about subordinates' budgets and performance to their co-workers mitigates budget slack when superiors do not use budgets as a basis for resource allocation. These results highlight the synergies between the planning (resource allocation) and control (performance evaluation) functions of managerial accounting practices such as budgeting. Our results also suggest that by designing the internal information system to reduce information asymmetry among subordinates, the firm can increase subordinates' incentives to provide more accurate budgets.

We develop and estimate an econometric model of limit-order execution times using survival analysis and actual limit-order data. We estimate versions for time-to-first-fill and time-to-completion for both buy and sell limit orders, and incorporate the effects of explanatory variables such as the limit price, limit size, bid/offer spread, and market volatility. Execution times are very sensitive to the limit price, but are not sensitive to limit size. Hypothetical limit-order executions, constructed either theoretically from first-passage times or empirically from transactions data, are very poor proxies for actual limit-order executions.

A large body of literature suggests that firm-level stock prices “underreact” to news about future cash flows; i.e., shocks to a firm's expected cash flows are positively correlated with shocks to expected returns on its stock. We examine the joint behavior of returns, cash-flow news, and trading between individuals and institutions. Institutions buy shares from (sell shares to) individuals in response to positive (negative) cash-flow news, thus exploiting the underreaction phenomenon. Institutions are not simply following price momentum strategies: When price goes up (down) in the absence of any cash-flow news, institutions sell shares to (buy shares from) individuals. Although institutions are trading in the “right” direction, institutions as a group outperform individuals by only 1.44% per annum before transaction and other costs, because they are extremely conservative in deviating from the value-weighted market index.

Common currencies affect trading costs and, thereby, the amounts of trade, output, and consumption. From the perspective of monetary policy, the adoption of another country's currency trades off the benefits of commitment to price stability (if a committed anchor is selected) against the loss of an independent stabilization policy. We show that the type of country that has more to gain from giving up its own currency is a small open economy heavily trading with one particular large partner, with a history of high inflation and with a business cycle highly correlated with that of the potential “anchor.” We also characterize the features of the optimal number of currency unions.

Policy-makers often justify their choice of fixed exchange rate regimes as a shelter against nonfundamental influences in the foreign exchange market. This paper proposes a framework, based on endogenous noise trading, which makes sense of the policy-makers' view. We show that as a result of multiple equilibria, the model violates Mundell's “Incompatible Trinity:” under some conditions, it is possible to reduce the volatility of the exchange rate without any sacrifice in terms of monetary autonomy. We provide empirical evidence supportive of the existence of a nonfundamental channel in the link between exchange rate regimes and exchange rate volatility. If … markets come to believe exchange rate stability is not itself a significant policy objective, we should not be surprised that snowballing cumulative movements can develop that appear widely out of keeping with current balance-of-payments prospects or domestic price movements. At that point, freely floating exchange rates, instead of delivering on the promise of money autonomy for domestic monetary or other policies, can greatly complicate domestic economic management [Paul Volcker 1978–79, p. 9].