We provide new evidence on the economic role of growth options behind the profitability, distress, lotteryness, and volatility anomalies. We use idiosyncratic skewness to measure growth options and estimate expected idiosyncratic skewness capturing investors’ expectations about the firm’s mix of growth options versus assets-in-place. We find that investors require a positive premium to hold stocks of inflexible firms with low growth options and negative expected skewness and that a newly proposed skewness factor based on growth options explains the aforementioned anomalies. Thus, the new measure of expected idiosyncratic skewness may serve to reduce the number of anomalies in the literature.

In this article, we evaluate the effect of managerial entrenchment on corporate information production using the voting outcomes of shareholder-initiated proposals intended to mitigate managerial entrenchment. We focus on the proposals that are passed or rejected by a small margin of votes, which generate plausibly exogenous variations in managerial entrenchment. We find that a reduction in managerial entrenchment enhances corporate information production. The effects are stronger for firms with greater information asymmetries and severer agency frictions. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the view that reducing managerial entrenchment enhances corporate disclosure by aligning the incentives of managers and shareholders.

The well-known weak empirical relationship between beta risk and the cost of equity (the beta anomaly) generates a simple tradeoff theory: As firms lever up, the overall cost of capital falls as leverage increases equity beta, but as debt becomes riskier the marginal benefit of increasing equity beta declines. As a simple theoretical framework predicts, we find that leverage is inversely related to asset beta, including upside asset beta, which is hard to explain by the traditional leverage tradeoff with financial distress that emphasizes downside risk. The results are robust to a variety of specification choices and control variables.

We show short selling in corporate bonds forecasts future bond returns. Short selling predicts bond returns where private information is more likely, in high-yield bonds, particularly after Lehman Brothers’ collapse of 2008. Short selling predicts returns following both high and low past bond returns. This, together with short selling increasing following past buying order imbalances, suggests short sellers trade against price pressures as well as trade on information. Short selling predicts bond returns both in the individual bonds that are shorted and in other bonds by the same issuer. Past stock returns and short selling in stocks predict bond returns but do not eliminate bond short selling predicting bond returns. Bond short selling does not predict the issuer’s stock returns. These results show bond short sellers contribute to efficient bond prices and that short sellers’ information flows from stocks to bonds but not from bonds to stocks.

We develop a theoretical model providing a new rationale for venture capitalist (VC) syndicate formation and empirically test our model predictions. An entrepreneur obtains financing and two different value-adding inputs from a single VC or from two different VCs, each operating in his area of expertise. We characterize the entrepreneur’s equilibrium choice between contracting with a single VC, individually with multiple VCs, or with a VC syndicate. We show that syndicates mitigate VCs’ moral hazard problem in value addition. We also analyze the dynamics of VC syndicate composition. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with our model’s predictions.

We study the impact of permanent open market operations (POMOs) by the Federal Reserve on U.S. Treasury market liquidity. Using a parsimonious model of speculative trading, we conjecture that i) this form of government intervention improves market liquidity, contrary to conclusions drawn by existing literature; and ii) the extent of this improvement depends on the market’s information environment. Evidence from a novel sample of Federal Reserve POMOs during the 2000s indicates that bid–ask spreads of on-the-run Treasury securities decline when POMOs are executed, by an amount increasing in proxies for information heterogeneity among speculators, fundamental volatility, and POMO policy uncertainty, consistent with our model.

I compare the U.S. capacity expansion decisions of public and private producers of 7 commodity chemicals from 1989 to 2006. I find that private firms invest differently than public firms. Private firms are more likely than public firms to increase capacity prior to a positive demand shock (an increase in price and quantity) and less likely to increase capacity before a negative demand shock. Potential mechanisms include public firm overextrapolation of past demand shocks and agency problems arising from greater separation between ownership and control.

We study the implications of predictability on the optimal asset allocation of ambiguity-averse long-term investors and analyze the term structure of the multivariate risk–return trade-off considering parameter uncertainty. We calibrate the model to real returns of U.S. stocks, long-term bonds, cash, real estate, and gold using the term spread and the dividend–price ratio as additional predictive variables, and we show that over long horizons, the optimal asset allocation is significantly influenced by the covariance structure induced by estimation errors. The ambiguity-averse long-term investor optimally tilts his or her portfolio toward a seemingly inefficient portfolio, which shows maximum robustness against estimation errors.

We estimate a model for the term structure of discounted risk-adjusted dividend growth using prices of dividend futures for the Eurostoxx 50. A 2-factor model capturing short-term mean reversion within a year and a medium-term component reverting at the business-cycle horizon gives an excellent fit of these prices. Hence, investors update the valuation of dividends beyond the business cycle only to a limited degree. The 2-factor model, estimated on dividend futures data only, explains a large part of observed daily stock market returns. We also show that the 2 latent factors are related to various economic and financial variables.

We examine the potential for management-worker alliances when employees have substantial voting rights, and how such alliances affect the balance of power between managers and shareholders. We find that substantial employee voting rights exacerbate the manager-shareholder conflicts. Specifically, they entrench incumbent managers and allow them to pursue value-destroying acquisitions by undercutting the disciplinary influence of the corporate control market. Importantly, employee support for managers is conditional on favorable treatment of employees. Our findings are consistent with Pagano and Volpin’s theory of worker-management alliances and highlight the potential risks associated with large employee voting power.

We study how media coverage impacts pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) around the world. Higher media coverage in the pre-IPO period leads to lower IPO initial returns. The effect is mitigated in countries with better financial reporting quality, greater shareholder rights protection, and more stringent media censorship, and for IPOs “certified” by reputable intermediaries, while it is amplified in countries with higher levels of media penetration and media trust. Further, IPOs with higher pre-IPO media coverage have lower ex post price revision volatility. Our findings suggest that higher pre-IPO media coverage reduces information asymmetry among investors, leading to less underpriced IPOs.

Prior research has examined the firm-level performance implications of “busy” boards. Firm-level analysis, however, masks important heterogeneity in the time constraints and expertise of individual busy directors. We develop and validate shareholder voting as a proxy for shareholders’ satisfaction. Our director-specific tests provide compelling evidence that the potential costs of busy directors outweigh their benefits. At the same time, we uncover new sources of heterogeneity among busy directors. For example, the downsides are more pronounced for directors who sit on boards where fiscal year ends cluster in the same month. Our analysis highlights the role of shareholder voting in board composition research.

Numerous papers have shown that developing economies are more volatile. We show that, despite greater aggregate and industry stability, performance and size of individual firms in developed countries are more volatile. In developing countries, market imperfections insulate incumbent firms from competition. Consistent with this, firms in developing countries have higher profit, higher market concentration, and less capital raising. Cross-country differences in operating risk and competition intensity are greater in industries that are dependent on external finance, where we expect higher impacts of capital-market imperfections. We show the inverse relation between aggregate and firm-level volatilities has important implications for international studies of cash holding.

We examine the effects of a temporary suspension of short-sale price tests on the options market. Consistent with the notion that put option trading substitutes for short selling, we find a significant reduction in put option volume. In addition, pressure on put option prices significantly declines, violations of the put-call parity become significantly less frequent, and option volume becomes less informed. Our findings add clarity to a long-standing debate on whether investors use options to circumvent equity short-selling restrictions.

We use proprietary transaction data on interest rate swaps to assess the effects of centralized trading, as mandated by Dodd–Frank, on market quality. Contracts with the most extensive centralized trading see liquidity metrics improve by between 12% and 19% relative to those of a control group. This is driven by a clear increase in competition between dealers, particularly in U.S. markets. Additionally, centralized trading has caused interdealer trading in EUR swap markets to migrate from the United States to Europe. This is consistent with swap dealers attempting to avoid being captured by the trade mandate in order to maintain market power.

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.

In this article, we examine the effect of social trust on local bias. Our evidence suggests that institutional investors located in high-trust regions of the United States exhibit lower local bias. Moreover, we find that high-trust investors are better diversified, suggesting that trust helps accomplish greater diversification. The results are not due to firm, demographic, or local economic characteristics. Additional analysis reveals that the documented informational advantage in local holdings exists only in low-trust regions. We show that this finding is consistent with a trust explanation.

We estimate Moody’s preference for accurate versus biased ratings using hand-collected data on the internal labor market outcomes of its analysts. We find that accurate analysts are more likely to be promoted and less likely to depart. The opposite is true for analysts who downgrade more frequently, who assign ratings below those predicted by a ratings model, and whose downgrades are associated with large negative market reactions. Downgraded firms are also more likely to be assigned a new analyst. These patterns are consistent with Moody’s balancing its desire for accuracy against its corporate clients’ desire for higher ratings.

Using data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE), we study the value added by (as distinct from the abnormal returns to) analysts’ recommendations. Recommending brokers’ clients trade profitably around positive recommendations at the expense of other brokers’ clients. Significant profits come from transactions before recommendation dates. Value added is greatest for upgrades to large caps, and largely insignificant for downgrades and recommendations of small caps, despite high abnormal returns. Brokers making profitable recommendations generate abnormally high commission income, recouping much of their clients’ abnormal profits, and their abnormal commission income varies in line with the abnormal profits for their clients.

Latency delays intentionally slow order execution at an exchange, often to protect market makers against latency arbitrage. We study informed trading in a fragmented market in which one exchange introduces a latency delay on market orders. Liquidity improves at the delayed exchange as informed investors emigrate to the conventional exchange, where liquidity worsens. In aggregate, implementing a latency delay worsens total expected welfare. We find that the impact on price discovery depends on the relative abundance of speculators. If the exchange with delay technology competes against a conventional exchange, it implements a delay only if it has sufficiently low market share.