This paper uses a novel dataset of commodity-linked notes (CLNs) to examine the impact of the flows of financial investors on commodity futures prices. Investor flows into and out of CLNs are passed to and withdrawn from the futures markets via issuers' trades to hedge their CLN liabilities. The flows are not based on information about futures price movements but nonetheless cause increases and decreases in commodity futures prices when they are passed through to and withdrawn from the futures markets. These finding are consistent with the hypothesis that non-information-based financial investments have important impacts on commodity prices.

We document that, in recent years, over 60% of convertible bond issuers conduct concurrent transactions including share repurchases, call option purchases, warrant sales, seasoned equity offerings, and stock lending program initiations. We investigate the determinants of issuers' choice of concurrent transactions and find that a proxy for capital supply (flows to convertible bond arbitrage hedge funds) is a significant determinant. Option purchases are more likely when capital supply is low and the convertible is dilutive to earnings. SEOs are more likely when firms have valuable growth opportunities and capital supply is low. Convertible issuers establish lending programs when arbitrageurs likely encounter difficulty shorting their stock, suggesting that these firms facilitate short selling in their own stock. These results suggest that, in the convertible bond market, the influence of capital supply extends beyond the issuance decision to the use of concurrent transactions and that these transactions offer important flexibility to issuers. We find that average equity market announcement effects differ when issuers conduct concurrent transactions. Consistent with models of adverse selection, concurrent transactions that reduce the dilutive impact on earnings, thereby making the design more debt-like, are associated with less negative announcement effects. Conversely, concurrent transactions that increase the dilutive impact on earnings, thereby making the design more equity-like, are associated with more negative announcement effects.

The offering prices of 64 issues of a popular retail structured equity product were, on average, almost 8% greater than estimates of the products' fair market values obtained using option pricing methods. Under reasonable assumptions about the underlying stocks' expected returns, the mean expected return estimate on the structured products is slightly below zero. The products do not provide tax, liquidity, or other benefits, and it is difficult to rationalize their purchase by informed rational investors. Our findings are, however, consistent with the recent hypothesis that issuing firms might shroud some aspects of innovative securities or introduce complexity to exploit uninformed investors.

We propose a simple method to infer the forecast error associated with quarterly estimates of earnings and revenue before the firm announces realized earnings and revenue. The method uses estimates of the profit margin implied by an analyst’s forecasts of both earnings and revenue to identify forecasts that are likely to be optimistic or pessimistic. The ability to anticipate forecast error permits a trading strategy that exploits the average market reaction following positive and negative earnings and revenue surprises.

We examine the extent to which firms from different countries rely on alternative sources of capital, the locations in which they raise capital, and the factors that affect these choices. During the 1990–2001 period, firms raised about 25.3 trillion of new capital, including 4.9 trillion from abroad. International debt issuances are substantially more common than equity issuances, with debt (equity) issues accounting for 87% (9%) of all securities issued internationally, and about 20% (12%) of all public debt issuances. Market timing considerations appear to be important in security issuance decisions in most countries.

We find evidence consistent with previously unrecognized market manipulation by broker-dealers. Specifically, we show that pre-trade hedging, which is distinct from front-running, alters prices at which derivative trades occur. We show this behavior is intentional by exploiting variation in the design of structured equity products (SEPs). We find positive abnormal returns on SEP pricing dates for which issuers benefit from altering closing stock prices but no such returns on pricing dates of otherwise similar SEPs. We also show that large buy trades near the close of trading are more frequent when SEP issuers have incentives to alter closing stock prices.

This paper uses a novel dataset of commodity-linked notes (CLNs) to examine the impact of the flows of financial investors on commodity futures prices. Investor flows into and out of CLNs are passed to and withdrawn from the futures markets via issuers' trades to hedge their CLN liabilities. The flows are not based on information about futures price movements but nonetheless cause increases and decreases in commodity futures prices when they are passed through to and withdrawn from the futures markets. These finding are consistent with the hypothesis that non-information-based financial investments have important impacts on commodity prices.

We use retail structured equity product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for large capitalization stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEP reference stocks based on a variety of factor models, and also predicts returns in Fama‐MacBeth regressions that include a wide range of covariates. Consistent with our interpretation that SEP issuances reflect investor sentiment, aggregate SEP issuances are highly correlated with the Baker‐Wurgler sentiment index. Tobit regressions reveal that proxies for attention and sentiment predict SEP issuance volumes, providing additional evidence consistent with the hypothesis that SEP issuances reflect sentiment.