This paper analyzes a new dataset for the aggregate daily trading of all foreign investors in six Asian emerging equity markets and provides two new findings. First, foreigners' flows into several markets show positive feedback trading with respect to global, as well as domestic, equity returns. The nature of this trading suggests it is due to behavioral factors or foreigners extracting information from recent returns, rather than portfolio rebalancing effects. Second, the price impacts associated with foreigners' trading are much larger than earlier estimates. The results suggest that foreign investors and external conditions have a larger impact on emerging markets than implied by previous work.

The costs of implementing investment strategies represent a significant drag on the performance of mutual funds and other institutional investors. It is the responsibility of institutional investors, and in the interests of the individual investors they represent, to seek market mechanisms that mitigate trading costs. We investigate an example of one such liquidity provision mechanism whereby liquidity demanders auction a set of trades as a package directly to potential liquidity providers. A critical feature of the auction is that the identities of the securities in the package are not revealed to the bidder. We demonstrate that this mechanism provides a transactions cost savings relative to more traditional trading mechanisms for the liquidity demander as well as an efficient way for liquidity suppliers to obtain order flow. We argue that the cost savings afforded this new mechanism are due to the potential for low cost crosses with the bidder's existing inventory positions and through the longer trading horizon, and superior trading ability, of the bidders. This research suggests that the ability to innovate via new liquidity provision mechanisms can provide market participants with transaction cost savings that cannot be easily duplicated on more traditional exchanges.

We examine the relation between the cost of debt financing and a governance index that contains various antitakeover and shareholder protection provisions. Using firm-level data from the Investors Research Responsibility Center for the period 1990–2000, we find that antitakeover governance provisions lower the cost of debt financing. Segmenting the data into firms with the strongest management rights (strongest antitakeover provisions) and firms with the strongest shareholder rights (weakest antitakeover provisions), we find that strong antitakeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt financing while weak antitakeover provisions are associated with a higher cost of debt financing, with a difference of about 34 basis points between the two groups. Overall, the results suggest that antitakeover governance provisions, although not beneficial to stockholders, are viewed favorably in the bond market.

Relying on a simple general equilibrium model of the term structure, we show that both nominal yields and real consumption growth rates can be affine in the unobservable state variables. We can then express real consumption growth rates in terms of nominal yields rather than the unobservable state variables with the coefficients of the resultant forecasting relation being endogenously determined by the term structure model. Using term structure data over the 1985 to 2000 sample period, the empirical evidence is consistent with our model more accurately predicting real consumption growth rates than a regression model based on the term spread.

For firms that adopted economic profit plans between 1983 and 1996, we document changes in investment behavior that lead to improvements in operating performance and growth opportunities relative to these firms' past performance. The improvements, however, are similar to those realized by a set of non-adopting control firms that are selected on the basis of a logistic regression model of adoption choice. We then consider the possibility that some firms are better candidates for economic profit plans than others and classify adopters according to whether they make anticipated or surprising choices based on the adoption choice model. We find that anticipated adopters make changes in investment behavior that reduce invested capital and allow them to become more profitable than a sample of control firms that were expected to adopt but chose to continue using a traditional plan. A similar analysis of surprise adopters does not reveal significant performance differences relative to a sample of anticipated non-adopters. The classification analysis suggests that economic profit plans work best for firms that are expected to adopt such plans based on pre-adoption operating, organizational, financial, and compensation characteristics.

We examine the importance of indexing, industry, and broad market forces in driving common effects in order flow, returns, and trading costs. Common effects are strong for order flow and returns in a sample of S&P 500 stocks, but are weak in a sample of non-index stocks and for trading costs in both samples. Industry and broad market effects exist in order flow for both samples, but indexing effects are dominant. Correlated order flow drives common effects in returns and, to a lesser extent, those in trading costs. An event study of the effect of index addition on order flow and return comovement reinforces these conclusions. Our results show that common effects are not pervasive and have implications for diversification strategies and price formation models.

This paper examines optimal capital structure choice using a dynamic capital structure model that is calibrated to reflect actual firm characteristics. The model uses contingent claim methods to value interest tax shields, allows for reorganization in bankruptcy, and maintains a long-run target debt to total capital ratio by refinancing maturing debt. Using this model, we calculate optimal capital structures in a realistic representation of the traditional trade-off model. In contrast to previous research, the calculated optimal capital structures do not imply that firms tend to use too little leverage in practice. We also estimate the costs borne by a firm whose capital structure deviates from its optimal target debt to total capital ratio. The costs of moderate deviations are relatively small, suggesting that a policy of adjusting leverage infrequently is likely to be reasonable for many firms.

We analyze the performance persistence in hedge funds taking into account look-ahead bias (multi-period sampling bias). We model liquidation of hedge funds by analyzing how it depends upon historical performance. Next, we use a weighting procedure that eliminates look-ahead bias in measures for performance persistence. In contrast to earlier results for mutual funds, the impact of look-ahead bias is exacerbated for hedge funds due to their greater level of total risk. At the four-quarter horizon, look-ahead bias can be as much as 3.8%, depending upon the decile of the distribution. We find positive persistence in hedge fund quarterly returns after correcting for investment style. The empirical pattern at the annual level is also consistent with positive persistence, but its statistical significance is weak.

This paper models the interaction of firm insiders and outsiders on a corporate board and addresses the question of the board's ideal size and composition. In the model, the board is responsible for monitoring projects and making CEO succession decisions. Inside directors are better informed regarding the quality of firm investment projects, but outsiders can use CEO succession to motivate insiders to reveal their superior information and help the board implement higher value projects. The optimal board structure is determined by the trade-off between maximizing the incentive for insiders to reveal their private information, minimizing coordination costs among outsiders and maximizing the ability of outsiders to reject inferior projects. I show that optimal board size and composition are functions of the directors' and the firm's characteristics. I also develop testable implications for crosssectional variations in the optimal board structure across firms.

Lockups are agreements made by insiders of stock-issuing firms to abstain from selling shares for a specified period of time after the issue. Brav and Gompers (2003) suggest that lockups are a bonding solution to a moral hazard problem and not a signaling solution to an adverse selection problem. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. In our model, insiders of good firms signal by putting and keeping (locking up) their money where their mouths are. Our model yields two comparative statics: lockups should be shorter when a firm is i) more transparent and/or ii) more risky. Using a sample of 4,013 initial public offerings and 3,279 seasoned equity offerings between 1988 and 1999, we find empirical support for our theoretical predictions.

This paper investigates the effect of company brand perceptions on investor propensities to hold stocks. We find that, after controlling for other determinants of stockholdings, there is a negative and significant cross-sectional relation between institutional holdings and brand visibility, which is consistent with the notion that individual investors prefer to invest in stocks with easily recognized products. Furthermore, we find that institutional holdings are positively related to firm size and beta. Our analysis supports the notion that institutional portfolios eschew relatively neglected small firms, whereas individuals prefer holding stocks with high recognition and, consequently, greater information precision.

We propose a mean-reverting stochastic process for the market beta. In a simulation study, the proposed model generates significantly more precise beta estimates than GARCH betas, betas conditioned on aggregate or firm-level variables, and rolling regression betas, even when the true betas are generated based on these competing specifications. Our model significantly improves out-of-sample hedging effectiveness. In asset pricing tests, our model provides substantially stronger support for the conditional CAPM relative to competing beta models and helps resolve asset pricing anomalies such as the size, book-to-market, and idiosyncratic volatility effects in the cross section of stock returns.

Motivated by the fact that investors have limited time and attention to process information, this paper provides a continuous-time equilibrium model to analyze the effects of a capacity constraint in the learning process of a representative investor, who optimally allocates her information capacity across multiple sources of uncertainty. Consequently, the cross-sectional structure of information and the resulting asset price dynamics are determined endogenously. The model provides implications on both consumption behavior and the cross-sectional differences in price informativeness in terms of supply of information, speed of price adjustments to fundamental shocks, and price reactions to firm disclosures.

We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close using a unique natural experiment provided by the London Stock Exchange where traders can choose between a call and an off-exchange dealership system. Although the call market dominates dealers in terms of price discovery, it suffers from a high failure rate to open and close trading especially when trading conditions are difficult. The call's trading costs increase with asymmetric information, slow trading, order flow imbalances, and uncertainty. Traders' resort to use of call auctions is negatively correlated with firm size, implying that the call may not be the optimal method for opening and closing trading of medium and small sized stocks.

This paper investigates the relation between ownership structure and firm value across a sample of 5,284 firm years of China's partially privatized former state–owned enterprises (SOE) from 1991–2001. We find that state and institutional shares are significantly negatively related to Tobin's Q, and that significant convex relations exist between Q and state shares, as well as between Q and institutional shares. We also find that foreign ownership is significantly positively related to Tobin's Q. We test for potential endogeneity of ownership, and find that Q and state/foreign ownership are not jointly determined. We also test for time-series, industry, and geo-economic location effects, and find our results to be robust.

The retained earnings hypothesis predicts that stock distributions accounted for by reducing retained earnings are a more credible signal of managerial optimism than stock distributions that do not reduce retained earnings. This study examines the costs of false signaling that are a necessary pre-condition for the hypothesis and finds them to be generally very small, calling the validity of the hypothesis into question for most firms. However, prior studies report broad-based market evidence consistent with the hypothesis. To resolve this apparent inconsistency, the study replicates and extends tests of the retained earnings hypothesis contained in three prior studies, and shows that the findings in support of the retained earnings hypothesis can be attributed to specification and measurement choices that bias the results in favor of the hypothesis. The support for the retained earnings hypothesis is weaker when the sources of the bias are removed. However, some support for the hypothesis remains for a limited set of distributing firms.

I investigate whether changes in stock market participation costs can explain the long-term increase in the number of U.S. stockholders. I separate these costs into two components: an information cost (the cost of collecting market information), and an entry cost (all other costs, including commissions and fees), and disentangle their general equilibrium implications in a noisy rational expectations economy. While a falling information cost cannot explain the observed increase in stock market participation, a falling entry cost can account for this plus several other features of the U.S. economy, including the falling equity premium, rising return variances, and the boom in passive relative to active investing.

This study employs a non-parametric approach to investigate the volatility risk premium in the over-the-counter currency option market. Using a large database of daily delta-neutral straddle quotes in four major currencies—the British pound, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the Swiss franc—we find that volatility risk is priced in all four currencies across different option maturities. We find that the volatility risk premium is negative, with the premium decreasing in maturity. Finally, we also find evidence that jump risk may be priced in the currency option market.

We show that stock market liquidity is an important determinant of the cost of raising external capital. Using a large sample of seasoned equity offerings, we find that, ceteris paribus, investment banks' fees are significantly lower for firms with more liquid stock. We estimate that the difference in the investment banking fee for firms in the most liquid vs. the least liquid quintile is about 101 basis points or 21% of the average investment banking fee in our sample. Our findings suggest that firms can reduce the cost of raising capital by improving the market liquidity of their stock.

The positive market reaction associated with an ADR listing is frequently attributed to a reduction in market segmentation costs that improves access to capital. If so, the benefit should be greatest for ADR firms that face relatively high indirect barriers to capital access. Our paper directly tests this supposition. We document that, following a U.S. listing, the sensitivity of investment to free cash flow decreases significantly for firms from emerging capital markets, but does not change for developed market firms. Further, emerging market ADR firms mention the need for access to external capital markets in their filing documents more frequently than their developed market counterparts and, in the post-ADR period, tout their liquidity rather than a need for capital access. Finally, the increase in capital access following an ADR is more pronounced for firms from emerging markets. Our findings suggest that greater access to external capital markets is an important benefit of a U.S. stock market listing for emerging market firms and is less important for developed market firms.