[Previous studies document that the stock returns of bond-issuing firms significantly underperform matched peers over the three to five years following issuance. We revisit this phenomenon and show that the underperformance is the result of an omitted return factor (a "bad model problem"). Debt issuers have significantly higher stock market liquidity than size and book-to-market matched counterparts, and differences in liquidity are largest for the worst-performing groups of issuers. When we additionally match on liquidity or when we include a liquidity factor in the model for expected returns, the evidence of underperformance disappears.]

We discuss the identification and estimation of discrete games of complete information. Following Bresnahan and Reiss (1990, 1991), a discrete game is a generalization of a standard discrete choice model where utility depends on the actions of other players. Using recent algorithms to compute all of the Nash equilibria to a game, we propose simulation-based estimators for static, discrete games. We demonstrate that the model is identified under weak functional form assumptions using exclusion restrictions and an identification at infinity approach. Monte Carlo evidence demonstrates that the estimator can perform well in moderately sized samples. As an application, we study entry decisions by construction contractors to bid on highway projects in California. We find that an equilibrium is more likely to be observed if it maximizes joint profits, has a higher Nash product, uses mixed strategies, and is not Pareto dominated by another equilibrium.

Equity market liberalizations open up domestic stock markets to foreign investors. A puzzle in the literature is why developing countries exhibit relatively small financial impacts associated with liberalizations. We use cross-firm variation in corporate governance at the time of the official liberalization of the equity market in Korea to test whether governance can explain the extent to which firms benefit when countries liberalize. The results show that better-governed firms experience significantly greater stock price increases upon equity market liberalization. Following the liberalization in Korea, foreign ownership in firms with strong corporate governance was significantly higher than that in firms with weak governance. Better-governed firms also exhibit higher rates of physical capital accumulation after liberalization.

We attempt to measure the effect of competition on bias in the context of analyst earnings forecasts, which are known to be excessively optimistic because of conflicts of interest. Our natural experiment for competition is mergers of brokerage houses, which result in the firing of analysts because of redundancy (e.g., one of the two oil stock analysts is let go) and other reasons such as culture clash. We use this decrease in analyst coverage for stocks covered by both merging houses before the merger (the treatment sample) to measure the causal effect of competition on bias. We find that the treatment sample simultaneously experiences a decrease in analyst coverage and an increase in optimism bias the year after the merger relative to a control group of stocks, consistent with competition reducing bias. The implied economic effect from our natural experiment is significantly larger than estimates from OLS regressions that do not correct for the endogeneity of coverage. This effect is much more significant for stocks with little initial analyst coverage or competition.

Previous studies document that the stock returns of bond-issuing firms significantly underperform matched peers over the three to five years following issuance. We revisit this phenomenon and show that the underperformance is the result of an omitted return factor (a “bad model problem”). Debt issuers have significantly higher stock market liquidity than size and book-to-market matched counterparts, and differences in liquidity are largest for the worst-performing groups of issuers. When we additionally match on liquidity or when we include a liquidity factor in the model for expected returns, the evidence of underperformance disappears.

Abstract The recent split share structure reform in China involves the nontradable shareholders proposing a compensation package to the tradable shareholders in exchange for the listing rights of their shares. We find that state ownership (the major owners of nontradable shares) has a positive effect on the final compensation ratio. In contrast, mutual fund ownership (the major institutional owner of tradable shares) has a negative effect on the compensation ratio and especially in state-owned firms. The evidence is consistent with our predictions that state shareholders have incentives to complete the reform quickly and exert political pressure on mutual funds to accept the terms without a fight.

In this paper, we show that the existence of a large, negative wealth shock and insufficient insurance against such a shock could explain both the limited stock market participation puzzle and the low-consumption–high-savings puzzle. We then conduct an empirical analysis on the relation between household portfolio choices and access to private insurance and various types of government safety nets. The empirical results demonstrate that a lack of insurance against large, negative wealth shocks is positively correlated with lower participation rates and higher saving rates. Overall, the evidence suggests an important role of insurance in household investment and savings decisions.

This study empirically examines the impact of the interaction between market and default risk on corporate credit spreads. Using credit default swap (CDS) spreads, we find that average credit spreads decrease in GDP growth rate, but increase in GDP growth volatility and jump risk in the equity market. At the market level, investor sentiment is the most important determinant of credit spreads. At the firm level, credit spreads generally rise with cash flow volatility and beta, with the effect of cash flow beta varying with market conditions. We identify implied volatility as the most significant determinant of default risk among firm-level characteristics. Overall, a major portion of individual credit spreads is accounted for by firm-level determinants of default risk, while macroeconomic variables are directly responsible for a lesser portion.

This paper takes an option-theoretic approach to explain why pricing anomalies are observed when traditional CAPM is used. By extending CAPM to incorporate the option-risk factor of stocks, we show that stockholders’ limited liability can explain Fama and French’s size and value effects. We use bonds’ excess credit spread as a proxy for stocks’ default risk to control for the changing non-diversifiable option-risk characteristic of stocks. Because sensitivity to the excess credit spread becomes smaller as size increases and as value decreases, excess credit spread explains the CAPM anomalies in a fashion similar to the Fama–French factors. While the excess credit spread is significant in explaining Fama and French’s size and value effects, adding the Fama–French factors does not improve the performance of our model. Our revised model resembles conditional CAPM, but it offers a more intuitive explanation for the size and value effects.