A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

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Results 2,385 resources

  • Debt overhang is associated with higher financial fragility and slower recovery from recession. However, while household credit booms have been extensively documented to have this property, we find that corporate debt does not fit the same pattern. Newly collected data on nonfinancial business liabilities for 18 advanced economies over the past 150 years shows that, in the aggregate, greater frictions in corporate debt resolution make for slower recoveries, with weak investment and more persistent “zombie firms” and that this is an important factor in explaining the difference in outcomes relative to household credit booms.

  • Financial institutions around the world expected the millennium date change (Y2K) to cause an aggregate liquidity shortage. Responding to the concern, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York auctioned Y2K options to primary dealers. The options gave the dealers the right to borrow from the Fed at a predetermined interest rate. Using the implied volatilities of Y2K options and the on/off-the-run spread, we demonstrate that the Fed's action eased the fears of bond dealers, contributing to a drop in the liquidity premium of Treasury securities. Our analysis shows the link between the microstructure of government debt markets and the central bank's provision of liquidity. We argue that Y2K options and their effects on liquidity premium broadly conform to the economic theory on public provision of private liquidity.

  • We show that wrongful discharge laws–laws that protect employees against unjust dismissal–spur innovation and new firm creation. Wrongful discharge laws, particularly those that prohibit employers from acting in bad faith ex post, limit employers' ability to hold up innovating employees after the innovation is successful. By reducing the possibility of holdup, these laws enhance employees'innovative efforts and encourage firms to invest in risky but potentially mould-breaking projects. We develop a model and provide supporting empirical evidence of this effect using the staggered adoption of wrongful discharge laws across U.S. states.

  • Financial regulators and investors have expressed concerns about high pay inequality within firms. Using a proprietary data set of public and private firms, this paper shows that firms with higher pay inequality—relative wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs—are larger and have higher valuations and stronger operating performance. Moreover, firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns and greater earnings surprises, suggesting that pay inequality is not fully priced by the market. Our results support the notion that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent.

  • How do individuals decide to become entrepreneurs and learn to make optimal entrepreneurial decisions? The concentration of entrepreneurs in regions such as Silicon Valley has stimulated research and policy interest into the influence of peers, but the causal effect is hard to identify empirically. We exploit the exogenous assignment of students into business-school sections to identify the causal effect of entrepreneurial peers. We show that, in contrast to prior findings, a higher share of entrepreneurial peers decreases, rather than increases, entrepreneurship. The decrease is driven by a reduction in unsuccessful entrepreneurial ventures; the effect on successful ventures is significantly more positive.

  • Social media has become a popular venue for individuals to share the results of their own analysis on financial securities. This paper investigates the extent to which investor opinions transmitted through social media predict future stock returns and earnings surprises. We conduct textual analysis of articles published on one of the most popular social media platforms for investors in the United States. We also consider the readers' perspective as inferred via commentaries written in response to these articles. We find that the views expressed in both articles and commentaries predict future stock returns and earnings surprises.

  • We propose a novel approach for measuring returns to mergers. In a new data set of close bidding contests, we use losers’ post-merger performance to construct the counterfactual performance of winners had they not won the contest. Stock returns of winners and losers closely track each other over the 36 months before the merger, corroborating our identification approach. Bidders are also very similar in terms of Tobins q, profitability, and other accounting measures. Over the 3 years after the merger, however, losers outperform winners by 24%. Commonly used methodologies, such as announcement returns, fail to identify acquirer underperformance.

  • We provide a rationale for window dressing wherein investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers make a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which affects investors' interpretation of the conflicting signals and hence their capital allocations. Conditional on good (bad) performance, window dressers benefit (suffer) from higher (lower) investor flows compared with non–window dressers. Window dressers also show poor past performance, possess little skill, and incur high portfolio turnover and trade costs, characteristics which in turn result in worse future performance.

  • We show that queue rationing under price controls is one driver of high-frequency trading. Uniform tick sizes constrain price competition and create rents for liquidity provision, particularly for securities with lower prices. The time priority rule allocates rents to high-frequency traders (HFTs) because of their speed advantage. An increase in relative tick size, defined as uniform tick sizes divided by security prices, increases the fraction of liquidity provided by HFTs but harms liquidity. We find that the message-to-trade ratio is a poor cross-sectional proxy for HFTs’ liquidity provision: stocks with more liquidity provided by HFTs have lower message-to-trade ratios.

  • This article presents a theory of capital allocation that shows how the use of net present value (NPV) as an investment criterion leads to inefficient capital budgeting outcomes and how this criterion may be dominated by other capital budgeting criteria, like the internal rate of return and the profitability index. The essence of our theory is rooted in the mainstream paradigm of corporate finance: while firms use NPV to measure the addition to firm value from prospective projects, "classical" informational and agency considerations prevent it from implementing the optimal capital budgeting outcome. Our theory also identifies conditions when alternative criteria should be used. Finally, we characterize when direct monitoring through capital budgeting dominates compensation contracts in alleviating the agency problem. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Last update from database: 5/15/24, 11:01 PM (AEST)

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