We analyze 3,547 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 1985 through 2003 to determine the impact of acquisition activity on long-run stock performance. The results show that IPOs that acquire within a year of going public significantly underperform for 1- through 5-year holding periods following the 1st year, whereas nonacquiring IPOs do not significantly underperform over these time frames. For example, the mean 3-year style-adjusted abnormal return is – 15.6% for acquirers and 5.9% for nonacquirers. Our cross-sectional and calendar-time results suggest that the acquisition activity of newly public firms plays an important and previously unrecognized role in the long-run underperformance of IPOs.

We develop a new methodology to estimate abnormal performance and risk exposure of nontraded assets from cash flows. Our methodology extends the standard internal rate of return approach to a dynamic setting. The small-sample properties are validated using a simulation study. We apply the method to a sample of 958 private equity funds. For venture capital funds, we find a high market beta and underperformance before and after fees. For buyout funds, we find a relatively low market beta and no evidence for outperformance. We find that self-reported net asset values significantly overstate fund values for mature and inactive funds.

Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. mutual funds from 1992 to 2004, we find strong evidence that investment bank-affiliated funds underperform unaffiliated funds. Consistent with the conflict of interest hypothesis, we find that affiliated funds hold disproportionately large amounts of stocks of their initial public offering and seasoned equity offering clients. Moreover, worse-performing clients are more likely to be held by affiliated funds. Our results are robust to alternative risk adjustments, portfolio weighting schemes, and regression methodologies. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that investment banks use affiliated funds to support underwriting business at the expense of fund shareholders.

We examine the relation between mutual fund votes on shareholder executive compensation proposals and pension-related business ties between fund families and the firms. In unconditional tests, we find that fund families support management when they have pension ties to the firm. We find no relation when we stratify by fund family in conditional tests, which suggests that fund families with pension ties vote with management at both client and nonclient firms. We confirm this result in an analysis of nonclient firms. Overall, our results suggest that pension-related business ties influence fund families to vote with management at all firms.

We find that equity mispricing impacts the speed at which firms adjust to their target leverage (TL) and does so in predictable ways depending on whether the firm is over- or underlevered. For example, firms that are above their TL and should therefore issue equity (or retire debt) adjust more rapidly toward their target when their equity is overvalued. However, when a firm is undervalued but needs to reduce leverage, the speed of adjustment is much slower. Our findings support the role of equity mispricing as an important factor that alters the cost of making capital structure adjustments.

We investigate the long-term effect of the Asian financial crisis on corporate cash holdings in 8 East Asian countries. The Asian firms build up cash holdings by decreasing investment activities after the crisis. We find that the increase in cash holdings is not explained by changes in firm characteristics but by changes in the firms’ demand function for cash, which indicates that the crisis has systematically changed the firms’ cash-holding policies. Specifically, the firms’ increased sensitivity to cash flow volatility is one of the main factors explaining the higher level of their cash holdings in the postcrisis period.

We study in detail the log-linear return approximation introduced by Campbell and Shiller (1988a). First, we derive an upper bound for the mean approximation error, given stationarity of the log dividend-price ratio. Next, we simulate various rational bubbles that have explosive conditional expectation, and we investigate the magnitude of the approximation error in those cases. We find that, surprisingly, the Campbell-Shiller approximation is very accurate even in the presence of large explosive bubbles. Only in very large samples do we find evidence that bubbles generate large approximation errors. Finally, we show that a bubble model in which expected returns are constant can explain the predictability of stock returns from the dividend-price ratio that many previous studies have documented.

This study uses Cremers and Petajisto’s (2009) method to separate active institutional investors from passive ones and shows that active investors can alleviate the anomalous comovement of stock returns. Focusing on 2 events linked to the excess comovement anomaly, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index additions and stock splits, I find that if an event stock has more active institutional investors trading in the post-event period, the anomalous comovement effect disappears. In contrast, if an event stock experiences a massive exit of active investors, this anomaly persists. The exit of active institutional investors also results in a strong price synchronicity effect.