Surprisingly few papers have attempted to develop a direct empirical test for overbidding in merger and acquisition contests. We develop such a test grounded on a necessary condition for profit-maximizing bidding behavior. The test is not subject to endogeneity concerns. Our results strongly support the existence of overbidding. We provide evidence that overbidding is related to conflicts of interest, but also some indirect evidence that it arises from failing to fully account for the winner’s curse.

We find that consumption risk is lower in states that implement countercyclical fiscal policies. Moreover, firms with an investor base that is concentrated in countercyclical states have lower stock returns, along with firms that relocate their headquarters to a countercyclical state. Therefore, countercyclical fiscal policies lower the consumption risk of investors and, consequently, their required equity return premium. This conclusion is confirmed by smaller declines in market participation during recessions in countercyclical states. Overall, the location of a firm’s investor base enables state-level fiscal policy to influence stock returns.

This article examines whether investors receive compensation for holding crash-sensitive stocks. We capture the crash sensitivity of stocks by their lower-tail dependence (LTD) with the market based on copulas. We find that stocks with strong LTD have higher average future returns than stocks with weak LTD. This effect cannot be explained by traditional risk factors and is different from the impact of beta, downside beta, coskewness, cokurtosis, and Kelly and Jiang’s (2014) tail risk beta. Hence, our findings are consistent with the notion that investors are crash-averse.

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank’s liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately expose relatively large banks to systematic tail risks, sovereign risks, or banking crises. Instead, we detect a persistent component in the tail risk of relatively large banks that is bank-specific and connected to government guarantees. Furthermore, as banks grow in relative size, tail risks are shifted to debtholders without wealth gains for shareholders.

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and their directors. The majority of directorships are held by extremely busy independent directors. These directors are sought by funds because they have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high-quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with investor withdrawals. Moreover, funds with busy independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, abuse discretionary liquidity restrictions, or engage in performance-based risk shifting.

We develop an empirical model of bilateral exchange rates. It includes normal shocks with stochastic variance and jumps in an exchange rate and in its variance. The probability of a jump in an exchange rate corresponding to depreciation (appreciation) of the U.S. dollar is increasing in the domestic (foreign) interest rate. The probability of a jump in variance is increasing in the variance only. Jumps in exchange rates are associated with announcements; jumps in variance are not. On average, jumps account for 25% of currency risk. The dollar carry index retains these features. Options suggest that jump risk is priced.

Whereas corporate political connections are known to enhance equity values, we demonstrate that union political activity can have the opposite effect. We examine the consequences of a recent Australian state law that restricts union political activity but does not change collective bargaining rights. In the wake of this law, the equity values of affected unionized firms significantly increase, and consistent with this market reaction, these firms are able to bargain for more favorable labor contracts than their unionized peers in other states. The evidence strongly suggests that unions use political activism to extract rents from shareholders and benefit their members.

We document a strong decline in corporate-diversification activity since the late 1970s, and we develop a dynamic model that explains this pattern, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The key feature of the model is that synergies endogenously decline with technological specialization, leading to fewer diversified firms in equilibrium. The model further predicts that segments inside a conglomerate should become more related over time, which is consistent with the data. Finally, the calibrated model also matches other empirical magnitudes well: output growth rate, market-to-book ratios, diversification discount, frequency and returns of diversifying mergers, and frequency of refocusing activity.

At subsecond horizons, bids and offers in U.S. equity markets are more volatile than what would be implied by long-term fundamentals. To assess costs and consequences, this paper suggests that traders’ random delays (latencies) interact with quote volatility to generate execution price risk and relative latency costs. Analysis of the behavior of quote setters suggests that this volatility is more likely to arise from recurrent cycles of undercutting similar to the Edgeworth cycles found in product markets rather than mixed strategies of limit-order placement.

Myopic investors focus on short-run price changes rather than long-term fundamental value, resulting in an overweighting of public information and a slow diffusion of fundamental news. Such processing of information can produce price drifts similar to those seen in behavioral models of momentum. We explore the impact of myopia over an international sample, finding that momentum is stronger in more myopic countries, and this relationship is magnified where the proportion of funds under delegated management is high. We therefore argue that investor myopia, which arises due to agency issues in delegated funds management, is an important determinant of momentum.

We investigate potential mechanisms through which market-wide sentiment affects firms’ innovation activities. We provide evidence for the financing channel by showing that financially constrained firms are more likely to issue equity and invest more in research and development (R&D) than financially unconstrained firms at high market sentiment. Using time-varying manager sentiment measures, we find suggestive evidence for a sentiment spillover channel whereby market sentiment affects R&D investments through influencing manager sentiment. Furthermore, better patent portfolios are produced from R&D investments stimulated by high market sentiment. Market sentiment has a stronger impact on R&D than the capital expenditures of financially constrained firms.

The impact of liquidity-motivated institutional trading on firms’ real decisions is not confined to periods of financial crisis. Firms subject to mutual fund flow-driven selling pressure reduce share issuance and investment, whereas firms experiencing buying pressure do not increase investment, although they issue more equity. Firms under extreme selling pressure cut quarterly investment by 0.075 percentage points of total assets, which is 4.3% of the average quarterly investment in our sample. We also find evidence that the effect is not attributed to managerial learning or catering incentives. Rather, flow-driven trading affects investment mainly through its impact on the financing cost.

We provide evidence concerning the effect of managerial risk-taking incentives on merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions and outcomes for different types of mergers: vertical, horizontal, and diversifying. Using chief executive officer (CEO) relative inside leverage to proxy for the incentives of risk-averse managers, we find that CEOs with higher inside leverage are more likely to engage in vertical mergers, and those mergers generate lower announcement returns for shareholders. This effect of CEO relative inside leverage on returns for shareholders in vertical acquisitions is more pronounced when the acquirer has a higher degree of informational opacity, weak governance, and excess cash.

Mutual fund managers with degrees from elite universities tend to outperform their counterparts from less elite universities. We show that the better performance of elite graduates is generated from their better connections with underwriters that facilitate allocations to underpriced initial public offerings (IPOs). Indeed, we find that the funds outperform only in months when they are connected to underwriters issuing IPOs. A strategy of buying mutual funds in months when they are connected to underwriters scheduled to issue IPOs generates significant abnormal returns, as high as 4.08% per annum in hot markets.

Stocks with high uncertainty about risk, as measured by the volatility of expected volatility (vol-of-vol), robustly underperform stocks with low uncertainty about risk by 8% per year. This vol-of-vol effect is distinct from (combinations of) at least 20 previously documented return predictors, survives many robustness checks, and holds in the United States and across European stock markets. We empirically explore the pricing mechanism behind the vol-of-vol effect. The evidence points toward preference-based explanations and away from alternative explanations. Collectively, our results show that uncertainty about risk is highly relevant for stock prices.

We quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the specific collateral repurchase agreement (repo) rates of all outstanding U.S. Treasury securities. We find a positive and significant scarcity premium for on- and off-the-run Treasuries that persists for approximately 3 months and is larger in magnitude for shorter-term securities. This scarcity effect seems to pass through to Treasury cash market prices, providing additional evidence for the scarcity channel of quantitative easing (QE). On the contrary, the Federal Reserve’s reverse repo operations could help reduce the scarcity premium by alleviating potential shortages of high-quality collateral.

We study the effect of antitakeover provisions (ATPs) on innovation. To establish causality, we use a regression discontinuity approach that relies on locally exogenous variation generated by shareholder proposal votes. We find a positive, causal effect of ATPs on innovation. This positive effect is more pronounced in firms that are subject to a larger degree of information asymmetry and operate in more competitive product markets. The evidence suggests that ATPs help nurture innovation by insulating managers from short-term pressures arising from equity markets. Finally, the number of ATPs contributes positively to firm value for firms involved in intensive innovation activities.

We document that a firm’s culture, specifically, its religiosity, affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions. Further, religiosity has additional explanatory power for the cost of bank loans (but not the cost of public bonds) beyond its impact through ratings. This supports the argument that banks have superior abilities in pricing soft information, such as corporate culture. Finally, the impact of religiosity is stronger when the lender is a small bank.

Using unique U.S. Census data sets, we analyze how entrepreneurial firms’ product market characteristics affect their choice between going public, being acquired, or remaining private. Size, total factor productivity (TFP), sales growth, capital expenditure, market share, access to private funding, and human capital intensiveness significantly increase a private firm’s likelihood of an initial public offering (IPO) relative to an acquisition. Firms in industries with less information asymmetry and higher stock liquidity are more likely to choose an IPO over an acquisition. While TFP peaks around either form of exit, the rate of increase in TFP prior to acquisitions and the subsequent decrease is smaller than that around IPOs.

This article presents a stochastic equilibrium model for environmental markets that allows us to study the characteristic properties of emission permit prices induced by the design of today’s cap-and-trade systems. We characterize emission permits as highly nonlinear contingent claims on economy-wide emissions and reveal their hybrid nature between investment and consumption assets. Our model makes predictions about the dynamics and volatility structure of emission permit prices, the forward price curve, and the implications for option pricing in this market. Empirical evidence from existing emissions markets shows that the model explains the stylized facts of emission permit prices and related derivatives.