ABSTRACT Dealers in the over‐the‐counter municipal bond market form trading networks with other dealers to mitigate search frictions. Regulatory data show that this network has a core‐periphery structure with 10 to 30 hubs and over 2,000 peripheral broker‐dealers in which bonds flow from periphery to core and partially back. Central dealers charge investors up to double the round‐trip markups compared to peripheral dealers. In turn, central dealers provide immediacy by matching buyers with sellers more directly and prearranging fewer trades, especially during stress times. Investors thus face a trade‐off between execution cost and speed, consistent with network models of decentralized trade.

We examine the extent to which institutional investors herd in the U.S. corporate bond market and the price impact of their herding behavior. We find that the level of institutional herding in corporate bonds is substantially higher than what is documented for equities, and that sell herding is much stronger and more persistent than buy herding. The price impact of herding is also highly asymmetric. While buy herding facilitates price discovery, sell herding causes transitory yet large price distortions. Such price destabilizing effect of sell herding is particularly pronounced for speculative-grade, small, and illiquid bonds, and during the financial crisis.

ABSTRACT This paper studies, both theoretically and empirically, how subordinates to CEOs can discipline the CEOs' self-serving activities. I predict that because CEOs' self-serving activities hurt the subordinates through the subordinates' stakes in the firms, the subordinates who observe these activities will take actions that negatively affect the CEOs, and that in anticipation of such reactions by subordinates, the CEOs will limit their own misbehaviors. This disciplinary mechanism will become more effective when the CEOs' self-serving activities are more observable to subordinates. Further, the sensitivity of CEOs' self-serving activities to observability will increase (1) as the agency problem between CEOs and their subordinates intensifies, and (2) when external monitoring is less effective. The incentive pay for the subordinates will also decrease with the strength of external monitoring. Using a series of empirical tests, I find results that are largely consistent with my theoretical predictions. JEL Classifications: G34; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text, except for Glassdoor data, which are obtained by the author under a confidentiality agreement with Glassdoor, Inc.

We examine synergies in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) generated by firms’ comparative advantages in access to bank finance. We find robust evidence that greater access to bank finance increases firms’ attractiveness as acquisition targets. Targets’ comparative advantage in bank finance improves bank credit supply and reduces financing costs for the merged firms. These effects are more pronounced for acquirers with greater frictions in accessing bank loans and acquirers with greater growth opportunities. Overall, this paper reveals that targets, not just acquirers, contribute to financial synergies in M&As.

We collect compensation policy data from 60 Chinese mutual fund companies, which cover 88% of the assets managed by all active stock and stock-oriented hybrid mutual funds in China. Using the collected data, we investigate portfolio pumping from a performance-based perspective. We find that portfolio pumping is stronger for funds ranking around critical points of performance distribution (i.e., the top one-tenth, one-fourth, one third, and half cutoffs). This finding is mainly driven by funds from companies that set these critical points to grade fund managers’ bonus levels. Our findings provide evidence of portfolio pumping motivated by performance ranking instead of the flow-performance relationship documented in prior studies.

Children whose parents were self-employed before China’s socialist transformation were more likely to become self-employed after the economic reform, even though they had no direct exposure to their parents’ businesses. The effect is statistically significant only for sons. The lack of direct exposure to family businesses impedes the transfer of business human capital and motivates us to explore personality traits as the underlying mechanisms. We find that children with self-employed parents are also more likely to invest in risky assets and to consume cigarettes. This suggests that children of self-employed parents inherit personality traits that induce risky behaviors.

We examine the implication of executive gender on asset prices. Using a large sample of US public firms during 2006–2015, we find a negative association between female CFOs and future stock price crash risk. However, the impact of female CEOs on crash risk is not statistically significant. The results support the notion that CFOs play a stronger role than CEOs in curbing bad news hoarding activities because CFOs' primary duties are financial reporting and planning. Our findings are robust to several econometric specifications controlling for potential endogeneity and to alternative measures of crash risk. At last, we show that the negative relation between female CFOs and future stock price crash risk is more pronounced among firms with weaker corporate governance, less market competition, lower analyst coverage, and higher financial leverage. Collectively, our evidence highlights the importance of CFO gender for firm financial decision making and stock return tail risk.

This paper introduces a new approach to constructing optimal mean-variance portfolios. The approach relies on a novel unconstrained regression representation of the mean-variance optimization problem combined with high-dimensional sparse-regression methods. Our estimated portfolio, under a mild sparsity assumption, controls for risk and attains the maximum expected return as both the numbers of assets and observations grow. The superior properties of our approach are demonstrated through comprehensive simulation and empirical analysis. Notably, using our strategy, we find that investing in individual stocks, in addition to the Fama-French three-factor portfolios, leads to substantially improved performance. Received October 6, 2014; editorial decision July 13, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

ABSTRACT Using cross‐sectional forecasts, we combine fundamental analysis strategies based on quality, such as the FSCORE from Piotroski (2000) and the GSCORE from Mohanram (2005), with strategies based on value, such as the V/P ratio from Frankel and Lee (1998) and the PEG ratio. While all four strategies generate significant hedge returns, combining quality‐driven and value‐driven approaches substantially improves the efficacy of fundamental analysis. Our parsimonious two‐dimensional approach can be applied to a wide cross section of stocks and outperforms common practitioner approaches that require a lengthy time series of data. The improvements in hedge returns hold for a variety of partitions and are robust to controls for risk factors and other determinants of stock returns. While the efficacy of fundamental analysis has declined in recent years, this can partially be attributed to investors arbitraging away excess returns by investing in fundamental strategies.

Recently a new type of institution has emerged, crowd funders. These entities: 1) channel capital to create intellectual property; 2) gather information on project and entrepreneur quality; and 3) gauge demand information directly from individuals to improve the efficiency of capital allocation. Data from crowd funder Kickstarter allows new insights on capital formation and the role of entrepreneurial reputation formation in the venture funding process. This funding method includes all cases where entrepreneurs try yet fail to raise funds, a feature heretofore unavailable to researchers. We find that both positive and negative reputation acquisition significantly change measures of capital raising success.