We characterize the relation between asset structure and capital structure by exploiting variation in the salability of corporate assets. To establish this link, we distinguish across different assets in firms’ balance sheets (machinery, land, and buildings) and use an instrumental approach that incorporates market conditions for those assets. We also use a natural experiment driving differential increases in the supply of real estate assets across the United States: The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990. Consistent with a supply-side view of capital structure, we find that asset redeployability is a main driver of leverage when credit frictions are high.

The 4 equity market factors from Fama and French (1993) and Carhart (1997) are pervasive in academia and practice. However, not much is known about their joint distribution and dynamics. We find striking evidence of asymmetric tail dependence across the factors. While the linear factor correlations are small and even negative, the extreme correlations are large and positive, so that the linear correlations drastically overstate the benefits of diversification across the factors. We model the nonlinear factor dependence dynamics and explore their economic importance in a portfolio allocation experiment showing that significant economic value is earned when acknowledging nonlinear dependence.

A number of studies of U.S. stock returns document what is referred to as the investment or asset growth effect. Specifically, firms that increase investment or total assets subsequently earn lower risk-adjusted returns. This study finds substantial cross-country differences in the asset growth effect. In particular, the asset growth effect is stronger in countries with more developed financial markets, but it does not seem to be associated with corporate governance or the costs of trading. Overall, the evidence is consistent with a q-theory where financial market development captures either managers’ willingness or ability to align investment expenditures to the cost of capital, but it is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the asset growth effect is due to bad governance and overinvestment.

In this paper, we document that an application of a moving average timing strategy of technical analysis to portfolios sorted by volatility generates investment timing portfolios that substantially outperform the buy-and-hold strategy. For high-volatility portfolios, the abnormal returns, relative to the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the Fama-French 3-factor models, are of great economic significance, and are greater than those from the well-known momentum strategy. Moreover, they cannot be explained by market timing ability, investor sentiment, default, and liquidity risks. Similar results also hold if the portfolios are sorted based on other proxies of information uncertainty.

We study the value of stock liquidity in the market for corporate control and show that the target firm’s liquidity has an impact on the transaction itself and on the resulting merged entity. We use a sample of U.S. merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions (1987–2007) to show that acquiring a more liquid firm makes the stock of the acquirer more liquid. This has consequences for M&A activity and pricing. Public acquirers are more likely than private acquirers to acquire more liquid targets. Liquidity also translates into a greater likelihood of completing the deal and higher compensation for the target.

We study a sample of Form 13F filings where fund advisors seek confidential treatment for some or all of their 13(f)-reportable positions. Consistent with the hypothesis that managers seek confidentiality to protect proprietary information, we find that confidential positions earn positive and significant abnormal returns over the post-filing confidential period. We also find that managers are more likely to seek confidential treatment of illiquid positions that are more susceptible to front-running. Overall, our analysis highlights important benefits of reduced disclosure that are relevant to the current policy debate on hedge fund transparency.

We identify large discontinuous changes, known as jumps, in daily stock prices and explore the role of jumps in cross-sectional stock return predictability. Our results show that small and illiquid stocks have higher jump returns to the extent that cross-sectional differences in jumps fully account for the size and illiquidity effects. Based on value-weighted portfolios, jumps also account for the value premium. On the other hand, jumps are not the cause of momentum or net share issue effects. The findings of our study shed new light on stock return dynamics and present challenges to conventional explanations of stock return predictability.

This paper examines diversification as a source of value creation and destruction in private equity (PE) funds. Previous literature has focused on the “diversification discount” in corporations. However, in PE funds, diversification might increase returns by ameliorating managerial risk aversion and facilitating knowledge sharing. I examine a sample of 1,505 PE funds and show that industry and geographic diversification can increasePE fund returns. This is likely due to knowledge sharing and learning, not merely risk reduction. Diversification can reduce returns if it spreads staff too thinly across industries or is motivated by risk aversion rather than performance bonuses.

We examine the 2007 stock market bubble in China. Using multiple measures of bubble intensity for each stock, we find significantly smaller bubbles in stocks for which there is greater analyst coverage. We further show that the abating effect of analyst coverage on bubble intensity is weaker when there is greater disagreement among analysts. This suggests that, in line with resale option theories of bubbles, one channel through which analyst coverage may mitigate bubbles is by coordinating investors’ beliefs and thus reducing its dispersion. Stock turnover provides further evidence consistent with this particular information mechanism.

We examine how research and development (R&D) incoming spillovers affect long-run firm performance following firms’ R&D increases. We use a stochastic frontier production method to capture R&D incoming spillover effects. Firms reaping more benefits from R&D investment made by other firms experience more improvement in profitability and more favorable long-run stock performance in the post-R&D-increase period. Firms with higher levels of R&D incoming spillovers recruit more key employees from other firms, suggesting that obtaining know-how through hiring is an important source of incoming spillovers. The evidence also shows that firms experiencing more R&D outgoing spillover effects tend to underinvest in R&D.

We investigate whether and how government interventions in the U.S. banking sector influence the stock market performance of corporate borrowers during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We measure firms’ exposures to government interventions with an intervention score that is based on combined information on the firms’ structure of bank relationships and their banks’ participation in government capital support programs. We find that government capital infusions in banks have a significantly positive impact on borrowing firms’ stock returns. The effect is more pronounced for riskier and bank-dependent firms and for those that borrow from banks that are less capitalized and smaller.