This study examines the stock market forecasts and portfolio allocation decisions of small individual investors, based on survey data for 1987–1994. When investors are bullish, they increase their equity holdings; when investors are bearish, they decrease equity holdings. The surveyed investors are unable to time the stock market successfully. However, the shifts in their portfolios reflect past market movements and are consistent with positive feedback trading.

We examine how analysts respond to public information when setting stock recommendations. We model the determinants of analysts' recommendation changes following large stock price movements. We find evidence of an asymmetry following large positive and negative returns. Following large stock price increases, analysts are equally likely to upgrade or downgrade. Following large stock price declines, analysts are more likely to downgrade. This asymmetry exists after accounting for investment banking relationships and herding behavior. This result suggests recommendation changes are “sticky” in one direction, with analysts reluctant to downgrade. Moreover, this result implies that analysts' optimistic bias may vary through time.

The much publicized Tylenol incident in 1982 led to stringent packaging regulations for over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs. The sudden incident and the swift progression of associated events offer a unique opportunity to assess the wealth effects of the resultant regulations. The market value of common stock of Johnson & Johnson, makers of Tylenol, declined by approximately 29 percent, amounting to $2.31 billion. Although other firms in the industry also suffered significantly, their share price decline did not occur around the Tylenol incident but occurred around the subsequent packaging regulation proceedings. On average, 28 other pharmaceutical firms analyzed in this study experienced a decline of $310 million per firm, or a total of about $8.68 billion. The results suggest that the regulation had a significant negative effect on the common stock prices of firms in the pharmaceutical industry.

We investigate the effects of target initiation in M&As. We find target-initiated deals are common and that important motives for these deals are target economic weakness, financial constraints, and negative economy-wide shocks. We determine that average takeover premia, target abnormal returns around merger announcements, and deal value to EBITDA multiples are significantly lower in target-initiated deals. This gap is not explained by weak target financial conditions. Adjusting for self-selection, we conclude that target managers’ private information is a major driver of lower premia in target-initiated deals. This gap widens as information asymmetry between merger partners rises.

This study examines the valuation consequences of control-related outcomes that follow toehold acquisitions. We find evidence that toehold acquisitions facilitate value enhancing control transfers. The types of control transfers not only include takeovers, but also internal mechanisms, such as proxy fights and management turnovers. We find that toehold targets experiencing such control transfers exhibit an abnormal increase in share value, while those not experiencing such control transfers exhibit an abnormal decrease in share value. The results suggest that the positive valuation effect associated with toehold acquisitions reflects the expected benefits of subsequent control transfers.

This paper examines the pricing of lookback and barrier options when the underlying asset follows the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) process. We construct a trinomial method to approximate the CEV process and use it to price lookback and barrier options. For look-back options, we find that the technique proposed by Babbs for the lognormal case can be modified to value lookbacks when the asset price follows the CEV process. We demonstrate the accuracy of our approach for different parameter values of the CEV process. We find that the prices of barrier and lookback options for the CEV process deviate significantly from those for the lognormal process. For standard options, the corresponding differences between the CEV and Black-Scholes models are relatively small. Our results show that it is much more important to have the correct model specification for options that depend on extrema than for standard options.

We derive formulas for the valuation of call options on stocks and bonds when the defaultfree rate is stochastic. The formulas highlight the role of the correlation between the unanticipated returns on the underlying security and the changes in the short-term rate in determining the options value. Our numerical analysis indicates that option prices predicted by the proposed formula differ from those predicted by the Black and Scholes formula when this correlation is relatively large and the short-term rate's instantaneous variance is relatively large as well. Moreover, the proposed formula predicts higher (lower) stock option prices than those predicted by the Black and Scholes formula for correlation values that are lower (higher) than some positive critical value.

Despite the overwhelming trend in mutual funds toward team management, empirical studies find no performance benefits for this phenomenon. We show it is caused by large discrepancies in reported managerial structures in Center for Research in Security Prices and Morningstar Principia data sets versus U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, resulting in up to 50-basis-points underestimation of the team impact on fund returns. Using more accurate Morningstar Direct data, we find that team-managed funds outperform single-managed funds across various performance metrics. The relation between team size and fund performance is nonlinear. Also, team-managed funds take on no more risk than single-managed funds. Overall, team management benefits fund industry performance.

This study explores the hypothesis that capital structure change provides bidders and targets a motive for merger. After a brief review of theories that would support the hypothesis, the paper reports results of tests on (1) leverage in bidder and target firms, and (2) change in shareholder wealth associated with change in leverage. The findings support the theory of Myers and Majluf that “slack-rich” bidders pair with “slack-poor” targets to create value. These results are contrary to other studies, which find highly levered bidders.

Several studies used a multi-factor model to examine the interest rate sensitivity of a financial intermediary's common stock. The model was re-specified in an attempt to estimate each factor's influence. This note shows that the re-specification results in biased estimators. Hypothesis tests are flawed by failure to acknowledge the bias; this casts doubt upon the reported findings

This paper investigates the relation between media coverage and offering yield spreads using a comprehensive dataset of 5,338 industrial bonds issued from 1990 to 2011. We find that media coverage is negatively associated with firms’ cost of debt. This association is robust to controlling for standard yield determinants, different model specifications, and endogeneity. We identify 4 economic channels through which media coverage influences the cost of debt: Information asymmetry, governance, liquidity, and default risk. Importantly, media coverage has an independent influence beyond the effects of these economic mechanisms and is not a proxy for other firm attributes.

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the role of the secondary market in the pricing of initial public offerings. We argue that incomplete spanning of the primary issues in the secondary market and limited investor access play an important role in the pricing of initial public offerings. Utilizing a segmented market approach wherein IPO offering values are determined in the primary market and after-market bid prices are determined in the centrally accessed secondary market, we derive a price differential in the primary and secondary markets that is consistent with the received notion of IPO underpricing. Empirical tests on a large sample of IPOs provide results that are consistent with the predictions of our theoretical analysis.

We examine the effects of nonmonetary benefits on overall executive compensation from the perspective of the living environment at the firm headquarters. Companies in polluted, high crime rate, or otherwise unpleasant locations pay higher compensation to their chief executive officers (CEOs) than companies located in more livable locations. This premium in pay for quality of life is stronger when firms face tougher competition in the managerial labor market, when the CEO is hired from outside, and when the CEO has short-term career concerns. Overall, the geographic desirability of the corporate headquarters is an effective substitute for CEO monetary pay.

We support and generalize our original results (1978) in light of potential impediments to a pure market solution to agency problems and potential causal links between liquidation and bankruptcy. In the case of bankruptcy costs, market impediments are easily eliminated through the inclusion of simple provisions in corporate charters and bond indentures. Further, we demonstrate that recent attempts to link liquidation costs to capital structure are without merit. If the firm is to be liquidated on the basis of a rule other than one that maximizes the total value of all the claimants, arbitrage profits arise, and informal reorganization will discipline management to follow the liquidation rule that is optimal for existing securityholders. Also, we find that the pure market solution is not readily generalizable to other classes of agency problems, particularly the risk incentive problem. However, the alternative solution of the risk incentive problem through complex financing contracting may be useful in explaining complexities in contemporary financial contracts.

We study the relationship between societal trust and risk-taking in the banking industry. Prior literature has found that societal trust is positively related to both financial reporting conservatism and financial reporting transparency, which reduce bank managers’ ability to take excessive risk. Additionally, bank managers in high-trust countries are more likely to exhibit higher pro-social behavior and, therefore, less likely to take excessive risk for personal benefit. Consistent with these arguments, we document that banks in countries with higher societal trust exhibit lower risk-taking and that these banks also experienced less financial trouble and fewer failures during the 2007–2009 financial crisis.

The interest rate term structure refers to the array of discount rates on a collection of pure discount bonds that differ one from another only by the timing of their redemption. The most common approximation to the term structure is, of course, the yield to maturity curve, which is usually depicted as a smooth curve that relates rates of return on such bonds held to maturity to their term to maturity. Other expressions of the term structure also could be constructed, but underlying them all is the discount or present value function that we may denote δ(t). δ is the discount applied to a unitary payment to be made t periods hence. Expressing the term structure in this way does not necessarily imply that the term structure is itself driven by t, payment timings. Most economists would generally agree, however, that it is possible to draw smooth discount curves over the time axis. It is necessary to assume only that yield curves are continuous and smooth. By resort to arbitrage arguments implicit in equilibrium theories of the term structure, many economists are willing to live with these assumptions.

This study shows that correlated trading by gambling-motivated investors generates excess return comovement among stocks with lottery features. Lottery-like stocks comove strongly with one another, and this return comovement is strongest among lottery stocks located in regions where investors exhibit stronger gambling propensity. Looking directly at investor trades, we find that investors with a greater propensity to gamble trade lottery-like stocks more actively and that those trades are more strongly correlated. Finally, we demonstrate that time variation in general gambling enthusiasm and income shocks from fluctuating economic conditions induce a systematic component in investors’ demand for lottery-like stocks.

The federal funds rate arguably is the most important interest rate in the U.S. capital market because it plays a central role in monetary policy and the term structure. This paper examines the micromechanics of the funds market. We show that in a continuous market with asynchronous trading, regulatory constraints and accounting conventions that focus agents' attention on discrete time instants have important implications for the dynamics of trading activity and realized market prices. We also exhibit a model of the market that explains observed regularities in the intertemporal behavior of the funds rate.

A major governance problem in closely held corporations is the majority shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders. As a solution, legal and finance research recommends that the main shareholder surrender some control to minority shareholders via ownership rights. We test this proposition on a large data set of closely held corporations. We find that shared-ownership firms report a substantially larger return on assets and lower expense-to-sales ratios. These findings are robust to institutionally motivated corrections for endogeneity of ownership structure. We provide evidence on the presence of governance problems and the effectiveness of shared ownership as a solution in settings characterized by illiquidity of ownership.

My purpose in this paper is to outline a new approach to the theory of the balance of payments and of balance-of-payments adjustment (including devaluation and revaluation) that has been emerging in recent years from several sources. Concretely, this new approach is found in the change in policy orientation adopted by the British government under pressure from the International Monetary Fund after the devaluation of 1967 failed to produce the expected improvement in the British balance of payments. The theoretical basis for the new orientation can be traced back to the work of the Dutch economist J. J. Koopmans. The new approach is also evident in the theoretical work of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, and R. A. Mundell and his students, although it is only fair to note that economists elsewhere have been working along similar lines. The essence of this new approach is to put at the forefront of analysis the monetary rather than the relative price aspects of international adjustment.