We examine the value impact of independent directors nominated by activists (Activist IDs). Firms appointing Activist IDs experience larger value increases than firms appointing other directors, particularly when Activist IDs have private firm experience and when their nominators remain as shareholders. This value increase persists over a long period and is greater than that of activism events without director appointments. The increase is also higher among firms with greater monitoring needs and entrenched boards. Moreover, the appointments of Activist IDs are greeted more positively by the market, and Activist IDs obtain more favorable shareholder votes and additional future directorships.

In 1997, the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted significant reforms in U.S. markets. Several studies document that the new order handling rules increased competition for Nasdaq stocks, but the reforms were designed with an additional goal in mind—to increase quote competition for the trading of NYSE-listed securities on Nasdaq (i.e., third market trading). An evaluation of the reforms in the third market indicates that they did not achieve this objective. Instead, both quote quality and quoting frequency were diminished, due primarily to elimination of the excess spread rule. This suggests that more significant changes are needed to increase inter-exchange competition.

This article empirically examines the interaction between entrepreneurial plaintiff firm litigation and venture capital (VC). The data indicate that, relative to nonplaintiffs, firms that litigate prior to (after) obtaining VC i) receive financing from less (more) reputable venture capitalists (VCs), ii) are subject to greater (similar) oversight by VCs, iii) receive less (more) VC funding, iv) are more likely to exit through an initial public offering than through an acquisition, and v) are less likely to be liquidated when litigation occurs after VC financing. The results are robust to different specifications, methodologies, and endogeneity checks.

A set of theorems was derived based on the following set of axioms: (1) financial management seeks to maximize the wealth of existing shareholders; (2) all projects being considered at period 0 are of one period duration and possess the attribute that their adoption or rejection by the firm will not affect the business risk of the firm's asset portfolio; and (3) the ratio of debt to total book capital is given as α, and r and k reflect the firm's business and financial risk however perceived by investors.

It was shown that the NPV of any project satisfying the above conditions could be evaluated for accept-reject purposes with a CC involving book weights. This CC yielded an NPV numerically equal to the NPV using market value weights under special circumstances, namely, when k = r (1 − λ) or when M0/V0 = 1 − α, a special case of which is M0 = (1 −α)c0, i.e., if the firm were at its investment margin. After determining the book value CC, which is denoted as β, it was shown that it can be applied repeatedly for testing period 0 projects satisfying our axioms, even if these projects are unknown to management at the outset of the period. A market value CC, denoted as γ, was derived which gives identical accept-reject signals as the procedure.

Throughout the finance and economics literature, it is widely recognized that taxation can significantly alter individual behavior and market equilibrium conditions. Yet, in the area of bonds, the impacts of taxation upon bond pricing have generally been ignored. The primary purpose of this paper is to trace out the impact of differential taxation of regular income and capital gains upon the pricing of coupon-bearing bonds.

The assumption that investors can borrow and lend at a riskless interest rate reduces the Mean-Variance (M-V) efficient set to only one optimal unlevered portfolio. However, once we realize that the market is generally imperfect and that the borrowing rate is higher than the lending rate, we can no longer use the mean-variance Separation Theorem. Instead, a number of unlevered portfolios must be included in the efficient set, while the optimal unlevered portfolio is selected on the basis of the investor's preference. The size of the efficient set of unlevered portfolios is a function of the type of empirical data used and of the disparity between the borrowing and lending interest rates.

The purpose of this comment is to make a comparison between the sufficient conditions of Soper [3] and of Norstrøm [2] for a unique internal rate of return (IRR). Such a condition is crucial for the implementation of a computer program, as for instance the one presented by Mao and Knoll [1] which makes use of Soper's condition. Therefore, it seems appropriate to investigate if one of the mentioned conditions is superior to the other, so that we could rely only on the more efficient one.

Among the elements of value reflected in the prices of corporate securities are the taxtiming options associated with the opportunities for investors to tax manage their portfolios by deferring gains and taking losses. We show that the aggregate value of these taxtiming options for the securityholders of a firm will be enhanced when the firm has multiple classes of tradeable securities outstanding. For that reason, the inclusion of debt as well as equity in a firm's capital structure should raise the total market value of the firm. We further show that, under most likely circumstances, there will be an interior optimal degree of leverage that will maximize tax-timing option values.

A convertible bond is a hybrid financial instrument that incorporates features of a bond (fixed income security) and an equity claim (usually common stock). In most instances the convertible can be exchanged, at the holder's option, for the common shares of the corporation issuing the convertible. The conversion value, or stock value, is the market value of the common shares for which the convertible can be exchanged. The bond value or floor price is the market value of an equivalent bond that does not include a conversion feature. The market price of a convertible will be the conversion value or the bond value, whichever is higher, plus a premium. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model which estimates the premium. The premium estimated is defined as the difference between the market price of the convertible and the bond value or conversion value, whichever is larger. No consideration will be given to convertible preferreds.

This paper discusses two fundamental issues in capital structure theory and analyzes the recent recapitalizations of Phillips and Unocal. It is shown that a value-maximizing capital structure may be inconsistent with shareholder utility maximization and that the Miller debt and taxes equilibrium may be inconsistent with a complete capital market. In spite of these and other unresolved issues, the markets's reactions to the recent recapitalizations of Phillips and Unocal are consistent with the predictions of capital structure theory. Except for small redistribution effects against bondholders, the recapitalizations per se had no positive impact on common stock values.

This paper examines the effect of risk differences on the oft-documented negative relationship between stock returns and inflation. We find risk-related patterns of coefficients on our estimates of the level and change in expected inflation and on unexpected inflation. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis developed in Fama [2] and in Geske and Roll [7] that future real output growth simultaneously helps to determine current stock returns and various measures of inflation.

This paper derives and numerically simulates maximum likelihood estimators for the drift in several important diffusion price models. The time series convergence properties of these estimators are compared to those of standard estimators including the geometric and arithmetic means. Merton (1980) demonstrated that it is difficult to efficiently estimate the drift in a log-normal diffusion model. We qualify and strengthen his result by noting that his estimator is the maximum likelihood estimator and by applying our simulation results. However, we also demonstrate that it is possible to efficiently estimate the drift in other useful diffusion price models. In particular, by asking just how much time is needed in order for the maximum likelihood estimators of the drift in different diffusion processes to converge, these results qualify and quantify Black's (1993) statement that “we need such a long period to estimate the average that we have little hope of seeing changes in expected return."

Traders can reduce search costs in dealership markets by entering relationships with dealers. However, dealers draw little informational benefit from these relationships in Treasury markets, due to low risk and information asymmetry. We investigate the extent, duration, effects on pricing, and potential benefits of client–dealer relationships. We find that relationship strength leads to higher execution costs for clients, more so during stressed market conditions but less so in the presence of information asymmetry and when trading in corporate bonds. Relationship traders are compensated with immediacy at times when search is costly.

We study the theoretical implications of cointegrated stock prices on the profitability of pairs-trading strategies. If stock returns are fairly weakly correlated across time, cointegration implies very high Sharpe ratios. To the extent that the theoretical Sharpe ratios are “too large,” our results suggest that either i) cointegration does not exist pairwise among stocks, and pairs-trading profits are a result of a weaker or less stable dependency structure among stock pairs, or ii) the serial correlation in stock returns stretches over considerably longer horizons than is usually assumed. Empirically, there is little evidence of cointegration, favoring the first explanation.

We analyze the profitability of government-owned banks’ lending to their owners, using a unique data set of relatively homogeneous government-owned banks; the banks are all owned by similarly structured local governments in a single country. Making use of a natural experiment that altered the regulatory and competitive environment, we find evidence that such lending was used to transfer revenues from the banks to the governments. Some of the evidence is particularly pronounced in localities where the incumbent politicians face significant competition for reelection.

We examine whether underwriters price up weakly demanded initial public offerings (IPOs) to prevent withdrawal. Our empirical strategy exploits a discontinuity in the distribution of IPO prices around the low boundary of the filing range. Offerings with a high ex ante withdrawal probability that are priced at this boundary are likely priced up to meet issuers’ reservation prices. We compare the aftermarket returns of these IPOs to the returns of other weakly demanded offerings where issuers’ reservation prices were likely not binding, and we identify a negative 8.4-percentage-point differential attributable to the aggressive pricing inherent in setting the price at the low boundary when withdrawal risk is high.

We examine how broad changes in work arrangements and lifestyles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected households’ location decisions. Using data on over 360,000 residential, interstate moves over the last 5 years, we find that more than 12% of moves were directly influenced by the pandemic. Among pandemic-influenced movers, over 15% of households cite that remote work influenced their move. Lifestyle-related (job-related) migration increased (decreased) significantly, particularly for the set of households who are likely to have access to remote work. We further find that these changes in migration patterns are positively related to post-pandemic economic growth.

We study how banks use “regulatory adjustments” to inflate their regulatory capital ratios and whether this depends on forbearance on the part of national authorities. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels of regulatory capital via a reduction in regulatory adjustments (without a commensurate increase in book equity and without a reduction in bank risk). We document substantial heterogeneity in regulatory capital inflation across countries, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations.

We study how the market return depends on the time of the day using E-mini S&P 500 futures actively traded around the clock. Strikingly, 4 hours around European open account for the entire average market return. This period’s returns have a 1.6 Sharpe ratio and remain high after transaction costs. Average returns are a noisy zero during the remaining 20 hours. High returns are consistent with European investors processing information accumulated overnight and thus resolving uncertainty. Indeed, uncertainty reflected by VIX futures prices rises overnight and falls around European open. The results are stronger during the 2020 COVID crisis.

Mandatory disclosure of CEO compensation peers signals potential outside opportunities for the cited CEOs by revealing which companies view them as viable executive candidates. CEOs cited often as compensation peers (especially by larger firms, which represent attractive employment opportunities) are more likely to leave for better positions or receive compensation increases. Equity-based awards following cites by larger firms have shorter vesting periods, suggesting these CEOs gain negotiating power relative to their boards. The disclosure requirement enhanced labor market transparency and led to higher compensation for highly cited CEOs without penalizing less cited CEOs, putting upward pressure on CEO compensation.