Market reactions to non-fundamental news (or no-news) reverse for extreme firm information environments. A one percentage increase in intangible returns for small firms (large firms) lead to a 2.33% decrease (0.70% increase) in monthly returns over the next 12months. The results are robust to firm characteristics adjustments, alternative measures of firm information environment and private information, idiosyncratic risk, and microstructure effects. The results are consistent with the cross-sectional findings of confirmation bias, where investors show stronger bias when the information environment is rich. We derive a model with confirmation bias that further explains the cross-sectional momentum pattern for the majority of firms in the market.

We examine the impact of information asymmetry on a firm's capital structure decisions with a unique information rating scheme that draws from 114 measures over five dimensions of information disclosures on each firm from 2006 to 2012. We find that a firm with high (low) information rating is related to low (high) debt financing and leverage. In particular, a firm that moves from the lowest to the highest information rating experiences a 7.8% reduction in firm leverage on average. This relationship is robust to firm characteristics, incentive conflicts, and the agreement theory of Dittmar and Thakor (2007). Our results suggest that information asymmetry is influential on a firm's pecking order behavior independent of these effects.

The Russell 1000 and 2000 stock indexes comprise the first 1000 and next 2000 largest firms ranked by market capitalization. Small changes in the capitalizations of firms ranked near 1000 move them between these indexes. Because the indexes are value-weighted, more money tracks the largest stocks in the Russell 2000 than the smallest in the Russell 1000. Using this discontinuity, we find that additions to the Russell 2000 result in price increases and deletions result in price declines. We then identify time trends in indexing effects and the types of funds that provide liquidity to indexers.

We explore the conflicts between the controlling founder of a firm and her family members by studying how their ownership affects executive compensation differently. Using a sample of family firms in China, we find that the ownership of a controlling family owner is negatively correlated with the level of executive compensation and has a positive effect on pay-for-performance sensitivity. However, the ownership of other family members is positively associated with executive compensation and has a negative effect on pay-for-performance sensitivity. We find that when the quality of corporate governance is low and when other family members hold excess control rights in the firm, the unfavorable effect of other family members is more striking.

Abstract We study the joint responses of commodity future prices and positions of various trader groups to changes of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) before and after the recent financial crisis. Financial traders reduced their net long positions during the crisis in response to market distress, whereas hedgers facilitated this by reducing their net short positions as prices fell. This “convective risk flow” induced by the greater distress of financial institutions led to a change in the allocation of risk with hedgers holding more risk than they did previously. The presence of such a risk flow confirms the market impact of financial traders conditional on trades they initiate.

We document significant reductions in corporate payouts-both dividends and (to a larger extent) share repurchases-during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Payout reductions are more likely in firms with higher leverage, more valuable growth options, and lower cash balances, i.e., those more susceptible to the negative consequences of an external financing shock. Moreover, firms appear to use the proceeds from the reduction in payout to maintain cash levels and to fund investment. These findings are consistent with the view that a shock to the supply of credit (net of demand effects) during the financial crisis increased the marginal benefit of cash retention, leading some firms to turn to payout reductions as a substitute form of financing.

Based on the Merton (1977) put option framework, we develop a deposit insurance pricing model that incorporates asset correlations, a measurement for the systematic risk of a bank, to account for the risk of joint bank failures. Estimates from our model suggest that actuarially fair risk-based deposit insurance that considers only individual bank failure risk is underpriced, leaving insurance providers exposed to net losses. Our estimates also capture the size premium where big banks are priced with higher deposit insurance than small banks. This result is particularly relevant to the current regulatory concerns on big banks that are too-big-to-fail. Above all, our approach provides a unifying framework for integrating risk-based deposit insurance with risk-based Basel capital requirements.

Abstract How does trust affect business contracting at the firm level? We analyze the case of foreign high-tech companies investing in China, where the risk of expropriation of their intellectual property is high. We find that firms mitigate this type of risk by taking local trustworthiness into account when making investment decisions. Firms prefer to invest in regions where local partners and employees are considered more trustworthy; they are also more likely to establish joint ventures and to make greater research and development investments. We employ instrumental variable regressions and dynamic panel generalized method of moments estimators to alleviate endogeneity concerns and control for time-invariant heterogeneity.