How does the structure of financial intermediaries’ liabilities affect their asset holdings? We investigate the consequences of the 2014 money market fund (MMF) reform, which imposed redemption gates and liquidity fees on prime MMFs and forced prime funds marketed to institutional investors to switch from constant to floating net asset value. These changes made prime MMFs’ liabilities less money-like. As a consequence, the affected MMFs experienced an increase in flow–performance sensitivity and started taking more risks. In addition, the total funding provided by MMFs to the corporate sector, and especially to safer issuers, has decreased.

The intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) predicts that an unobservable factor capturing changes in expected market returns should be priced in the cross section. My Bayesian framework accounts for uncertainty in the intertemporal risk factor and gauges the effects of prior information about investment opportunities on model inferences. Whereas an uninformative prior specification produces weak evidence that intertemporal risk is priced, incorporating prior information about market-return predictability generates a large space of ex ante reasonable priors in which the estimated intertemporal risk factor is positively priced. Overall, the cross-sectional tests reject the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and indicate support for the ICAPM.

It is often desirable to know whether or not a risky asset's beta coefficient has changed and, if so, at what point in time the change occurred. For example, this knowledge is of obvious importance to beta-using security analysts and portfolio managers. As another example, a given theory may imply that a particular firm's beta should have changed at different points in time. Investigators may want to test such a hypothesis. Furthermore, tests are frequently performed on the effects of events on residuals of the market model, tests requiring the assumption of beta stability. For these, and possibly other reasons, it is useful to be able to detect that a change in beta did, in fact, take place as well as, in some instances, identifying the point in time at which the change took place.

Little attention has been given to the behavior of option portfolio risk across different portfolio sizes, perhaps because many individuals view unhedged long option positions as too risky for rational investor consideration. It appears possible, however, to combine long option positions with less risky assets to produce portfolios with favorable risk-return characteristics [10].

This article has two goals. The first is to contrast two widely used definitions of risk aversion. The second is to establish the feasibility of plunging behavior, in the sense that a possibly large number of risk averse investors will not be diversifiers.

The application of linear programming techniques to the problem of capital budgeting has repeatedly been proposed in the literature. However, while the potential of linear programming models for this important area of business decisions is generally recognized, practical applications still face some severe limitations. This note focuses on one particular problem peculiar to the application of programming techniques to capital budgeting, namely the mutual dependence between the optimal solution of the linear programming model and the discount rate used to calculate the coefficients of its objective function.

A growing number of studies use dollar-weighted (DW) returns as evidence that bad timing substantially reduces investor returns, and that consequently the equity risk premium must be considerably lower than previously thought. This paper demonstrates that this method is subject to a hindsight effect (as prior returns influence levels of new investment) and derives a technique that corrects it. The results show that for mainstream U.S. equities, DW returns are low because of this hindsight effect (bad investor timing had very little impact). Thus, low DW returns do not imply that the risk premium is correspondingly low.

We develop a multi-country model with moral hazard and noise traders and show that investor sentiment should affect employment growth both domestically and abroad. Using a large sample of international industry-level data, we find strong support for the model’s predictions. We show that U.S. investor sentiment has a positive association with labor market conditions around the world, due to spillover effects as well as foreign direct investments from the United States. We also find that U.S. sentiment amplifies the negative effect of local financial crises on job losses, which supports the idea that financial development has a “dark side.”

The general framework employed in analyzing diversification among securities involves the mean-variance theory of portfolio selection described by Markowitz [8]. Observation of the securities comprising the efficient set indicates which financial sssets possess attributes (i.e., expected return and covariances) making them worthwhile components of an optimally diversified portfolio. This paper will be concerned with forming an efficient set from four security classes—common stocks, preferred stocks, corporate bonds, and U.S. government bonds (hereafter denoted CS, PS, CB, and GB, respectively). The first objective will be to derive and analyze an efficient set from a sample of these securities in order to determine which securities have potential benefits for diversification.

Virtually all commercial banks in the United States are supervised by one of the three Federal bank regulatory agencies. Although these agencies share the objective of identifying banks with financial difficulties that may lead to their failure under adverse conditions, they have never reached an agreement as to a uniform approach to capital adequacy. Under these circumstances and because of its critical value to bank regulation, the issue of capital adequacy has been extensively investigated by both practitioners and academicians. Those efforts have tended in recent years to concentrate on characterizing problem banks by using multivariate discriminant analysis. Typical examples are studies by Dince and Fortson [10], Sinkey [25, 26], and Sinkey and Walker [27], which use this method to identify the most indicative financial ratios for bank soundness and compare the ability of different formulas to predict bank failure.

In recent years, a number of studies have been published evaluating alternative bond portfolio strategies. These studies basically simulate risk-return characteristics for a variety of strategies designed for use by financial institutions. Typical strategies considered include portfolios of bonds that have laddered or barbell (dumbbell) maturity structures. In laddered strategies, bonds are spaced evenly among a number of consecutive maturities, while in barbell strategies, bonds are concentrated in short and long maturities. The results of these studies tend to differ and conflict. For example, in a recent article in this journal, Fogler, Groves, and Richardson (FGR) conclude that “dumbbell portfolio strategies are not as efficient as indicated by previous analyses.” Among the previous studies to which they refer is one by Watson, who concluded that “portfolios split between a spaced group of short maturity bonds and a longer investment security” (barbell portfolios) are most efficient. Similar results are reported by Wolf and by Bradley and Crane.

The problem of cash management, in its simplest form, is to formulate decision rules which control the level of a firm's cash balance to meet its demands for cash at minimum total discounted cost. Control is achieved by transacting securities for cash. The cost of control is the commission expense [13]. Optimality depends on balancing excess opportunity costs of holding balances which are too large and having excess buying and selling costs (to meet cash obligations) of balances which are too small.

The capital asset pricing model specifies that relative risk is a sufficient descriptor of security risk. This result holds under both the Sharpe-Lintner version,

and the more general Black version of the model,

where

= expected rate of return on asset i,

Rf = riskless rate of interest,

= expected return on the market portfolio,

= expected return on any “zero-beta” asset or portfolio of such assests, and

= relative risk of asset i in the market portfolio of assests.

This study considers a model in which a corporate manager has private information and engages in i) anonymous trading on personal account in the secondary market, and ii) the corporate issuance of new shares in the primary market. The paper examines the equilibrium tradeoff of insider trading profits against the manager's share of the corporate consequences of the primary issue. In the resulting equilibrium, managers, acting in their own best interests, seem to behave according to differing objective functions. In some cases, they seem to maximize intrinsic value, in others, insider trading profits seem to dominate, and still others seem to be concerned with both. Hence, the presence of anonymous trading around corporate financings brings into question the use of corporate objective functions with exogenously fixed weights.

This article studies time variation in the expected excess returns of traded claims on dividends, bonds, and stock indices for international markets. We introduce a novel dividend risk factor that complements the bond risk factor of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). By aggregating over 4 regions (United States, United Kingdom, Eurozone, and Japan), we create global dividend and bond factors. Our global 2-factor model captures the excess returns of most Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) country indices, as well as a variety of other test assets. Our findings highlight the value of the information contained in dividend and bond forward curves and suggest substantial comovement in international risk premia.

We analyze the impact of market frictions on the trading volume and liquidity premia of finite-maturity assets when investors differ in their trading needs. Our equilibrium model generates a clientele effect (frequently trading investors hold only short-term assets) and predicts i) a hump-shaped relation between trading volume and maturity, ii) lower trading volumes of older compared with younger assets, iii) an increasing liquidity term structure from ask prices, iv) a decreasing or U-shaped liquidity term structure from bid prices, and v) spillovers of liquidity from short-term to long-term maturities. Empirical tests for U.S. corporate bonds support our theoretical predictions.

We hypothesize that social trust, in mitigating contracting incompleteness, may have an important effect on the activeness and effectiveness of delegated portfolio management. Using a complete sample of worldwide open-end mutual funds, we find that trust is positively associated with the activeness of funds and that trust-related active share delivers superior performance (e.g., approximately 2% per year for cross-border investments). Moreover, “trust in the market” and “trust in managers” play important yet different roles for different types of cross-border delegated portfolio management. Our results suggest that trust acts as a fundamental building block for delegated portfolio management.

This study exploits a new long-run data set of daily bid and offered exchange rates in spot and forward markets from 1919 to the present to analyze carry returns in fixed and floating currency regimes. We first find that outsized carry returns occur exclusively in the floating regime, being zero in the fixed regime. Second, we show that fixed-to-floating regime shifts are associated with negative returns to a carry strategy implemented only on floating currencies, robust to the inclusion of volatility risks. These shifts are typically characterized by global flight-to-safety events that represent bad times for carry traders.

Passive exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are ideally suited to style-level feedback trading because of their high liquidity, ease of short selling, and pure play on investment styles. I find strong evidence of short-term style-momentum trading in ETFs. Institutional investors that use ETFs do not act as arbitrageurs by trading against style momentum. Institutions, especially less sophisticated ones, are themselves style-momentum traders. Moreover, recent style-level demand predicts style-level return reversals. These findings suggest that uninformed positive feedback trading by less sophisticated market participants can destabilize financial markets in the short run.

To learn about investors' information processing, we examine the issuances of trust preferred stock, a leverage-neutral hybrid security. Specific benefits of trust preferred stock issuance have become focal points for issuers. These focal benefits include tax and financial distress avoidance, for example. We find these benefits are associated with short-run stock price misreactions. For those issuers that do not have a focal issuance benefit, mean short-run abnormal returns tend to be negative but long-run abnormal returns tend to be positive. Unanticipated changes in long-run profit opportunities, not short-run operating profits, appear to be the key to the misreaction.