By collecting and disseminating price-sensitive information, financial analysts should reduce firm insiders’ informational advantage with a consequent impact on trading dynamics and market quality. We empirically examine the impact of complete analysts’ coverage termination on stocks’ liquidity, price discovery, and insider trading profitability. Termination leads to deteriorating liquidity and price efficiency, more informed trading, and higher profitability of insider trades. The magnitude of these effects depends on the strength of insiders’ ownership and on management’s decision whether to improve the firm’s information environment after coverage termination. Institutional investors alleviate, but do not eliminate, the negative effects of termination.

We reconsider whether hedge funds’ time-varying risk factor exposures are predictive of superior performance. We construct an overall measure (BA) of fund managers and present evidence that top beta active managers deliver superior long-term out-of-sample performance compared to top alpha active managers. BA captures the time-varying nature of beta exposures and can be interpreted as a common factor of both systematic risk (SR) and (1 - R2) measures. BA also compares favorably to extant measures of market timing, capturing the explanatory power of such measures of hedge fund performance.

We analyze the impact of market frictions on the trading volume and liquidity premia of finite-maturity assets when investors differ in their trading needs. Our equilibrium model generates a clientele effect (frequently trading investors hold only short-term assets) and predicts i) a hump-shaped relation between trading volume and maturity, ii) lower trading volumes of older compared with younger assets, iii) an increasing liquidity term structure from ask prices, iv) a decreasing or U-shaped liquidity term structure from bid prices, and v) spillovers of liquidity from short-term to long-term maturities. Empirical tests for U.S. corporate bonds support our theoretical predictions.

Exploiting differential interstate-branching deregulation across contiguous counties of adjacent states, we investigate the effect of entry threat on incumbent banks’ loan-loss provisions. Incumbents exposed to entry threat have offsetting incentives; lower provisions make their loan-underwriting quality appear better, deterring entry, but make local economic conditions appear better, encouraging entry. We find that the incentive to increase apparent loan-underwriting quality dominates on average. We further find that this incentive is stronger in counties with a higher proportion of heterogeneous loans, while the other incentive dominates in counties with both low heterogeneous loans and highly volatile economic conditions.

Short sellers are known to have private information about security prices. Empirical evidence of short selling, however, is based on only half of short sellers’ trading activity; specifically, the opening of the position. Using disclosed large-short-position data from the Japanese stock market, we provide the first detailed evidence of covering trades and find a positive reaction to short covering that only partially reverses. Although these results are consistent with substantial transaction costs for closing large short positions, they also reveal that some short sellers are privately informed about positive future events and have timing ability in covering positions.

To “ensure depth and liquidity,” the European Central Bank intervened in sovereign debt markets through its Securities Markets Programme (SMP), providing a unique opportunity to estimate the effects of large-scale asset purchases on sovereign bond liquidity premia. From reduced-form estimates, we find robust, economically significant impact and lasting reductions in sovereign bonds’ liquidity premia in response to official purchases. We develop a search-based asset-pricing model to understand our empirical results. The theory implies that bond liquidity premia fall in response to both official purchases and rising sovereign default probabilities, as seen in the data.

A major issue with predicting inflation rates using predictive regressions is that estimation errors can overwhelm the information content. This article proposes a new approach that uses a monetary-policy rule as a bridge between inflation rates and short-term interest rates and relies on the forward-interest-rate curve to predict future interest-rate movements. The 2-step procedure estimates the predictive relation not through a predictive regression but far more accurately through the contemporaneous monetary-policy linkage. Historical analysis shows that the approach outperforms random walk out of sample by 30%–50% over horizons from 1 to 5 years.

We examine the influence of outside directors’ industry experience on segment investment, segment operating performance, and firm valuation for conglomerates. Given board composition is endogenous, we instrument for the presence of industry expert directors using the supply of experienced executives near conglomerate firms’ headquarters. We find that industry expert representation on the board causes increased segment investment. Consistent with experienced directors playing favorites rather than acting as dispassionate advisors, segment profitability (firm value) is lower for segments (firms) with industry expert outside directors. We do not find analogous negative profitability or valuation effects of director experience for single-segment firms.

Private information imposes a severe trading disadvantage on uninformed traders while at the same time providing firms with valuable signals for investment adjustment. The two forces have opposite impacts on the cost of capital, and the net effect depends on which force dominates. We show that stocks of firms with low flexibility in investment adjustment (“value firms”) command an information premium, whereas stocks of firms with high flexibility in investment adjustment (“growth firms”) deliver an information discount. These results are consistent with the findings that growth firms exhibit stronger investment sensitivity to information in stock prices than value firms.

Straddles on individual stocks generally earn negative and significant returns. However, average at-the-money straddles from 3 days before an earnings announcement to the announcement date yield a highly significant 3.34% return. The positive returns on straddles indicate that investors underestimate the magnitude of uncertainty around earnings announcements. We find that positive straddle returns are more pronounced for smaller firms and firms with higher volatility, higher kurtosis, more volatile past earnings surprises, and less trading volume/higher transaction costs. This suggests that when firm signals are noisy, and/or when it is costlier to trade, investors underestimate the uncertainty associated with earnings announcements.

We examine pitfalls in the use of return-based measures of systemic risk contributions (SRCs). For both linear and nonlinear return frameworks, assuming normal and heavy-tailed distributions, we identify nonexotic cases in which a change in a bank’s systematic risk, idiosyncratic risk, size, or contagiousness increases the risk of the system but lowers the measured SRC of the bank. Assessments based on estimated SRCs could thus produce false interpretations and incentives. We also identify potentially adverse side effects: A change in a bank’s risk structure can make the measured SRC of its competitors increase more strongly than its own.

The value of corporate cash holdings has increased significantly in recent decades. On average, $1 of cash is valued at $0.61 in the 1980s, $1.04 in the 1990s, and $1.12 in the 2000s. This increase is predominantly driven by the investment opportunity set and cash-flow volatility, as well as secular trends in product market competition, credit market risk, and within-firm diversification. We document a secular decrease in the speed of adjustment (SOA) in cash holdings, particularly for financially constrained firms with cash deficits, suggesting that capital market frictions can account for the trend in the value of cash holdings.

This article provides evidence that firm value declines when credit default swaps (CDSs) are initiated and that the effect is greater when CDS trading activity is higher. This decline, which arises from an increase in the cost of capital as opposed to a decrease in free cash flows, traces to a deterioration in the firm’s credit quality and stock liquidity. Firm value declines less when CDS trading is likely to produce incremental information, suggesting that CDS trading has informational benefits for firm value. However, the evidence does not indicate that firm value increases because CDS availability facilitates investments.

We provide novel evidence that hedge fund performance is persistent following weak hedge fund markets but is not persistent following strong markets. Specifically, we construct two performance measures, RET_DOWN and RET_UP, conditioned on the level of overall hedge fund sector returns. After adjusting for risks, funds in the highest RET_DOWN quintile outperform funds in the lowest quintile by approximately 7% in the subsequent year, whereas funds with better RET_UP do not outperform subsequently. The RET_DOWN measure can predict future fund performance over a horizon as long as 3 years, for both winners and losers and for funds with few share restrictions.

There is widespread agreement that corporate debts’ recovery rates are time varying, but empirical work in this area is limited. We show that the joint information from the term structure of senior and subordinate credit default swaps can identify the level and the dynamics of recovery rates. We estimate a reduced-form no-arbitrage model on 46 firms across different industries. We find that the term structure of expected recovery rates is, on average, downward sloping. However, an inversion occurs during the 2008 crisis, suggesting the market expects higher recoveries conditional on short-term survival. The inversion is more pronounced for firms in distressed industries.

Masulis and Mobbs (2014), (2015) find that independent directors with multiple directorships allocate their monitoring efforts unequally based on a directorship’s relative prestige. We investigate whether bank loan contract terms reflect such unequal allocation of directors’ monitoring effort. We find that bank loans of firms with a greater proportion of independent directors for whom the board is among their most prestigious have lower spreads, longer maturities, fewer covenants, lower syndicate concentration, lower likelihood of collateral requirement, lower annual loan fees, and higher bond ratings. Our evidence indicates that independent directors’ attention is associated with lower cost of borrowing.

We examine how organizational form affects corporate payouts. Conglomerates pay out more than pure plays in both cash dividends and total payouts (cash dividends plus share repurchases). Furthermore, their payouts are more sensitive to cash flows compared to pure-play firms. The sensitivity of payouts to cash flow increases as the cross-segment correlation in a conglomerate decreases. Corporate payouts increase after mergers and acquisitions (M&As), especially among M&As in which acquirers and targets are less correlated. These results suggest that the coinsurance among different divisions of a conglomerate allows them to pay out more cash flow to their shareholders than pure-play firms.

We investigate an increasingly prevalent CEO succession strategy: recruiting CEOs from the board of directors (director–CEOs). Director–CEOs might be hired in a planned succession because they combine outsiders’ new perspectives with insiders’ firm-specific knowledge. Alternatively, directors may be recruited when the board is unprepared for a leadership change. We find that unplanned successions, in which director–CEOs are appointed as a “quick-fix” solution, result in a negative market reaction, deterioration in performance, and ill-fitting candidates with shorter tenures. Conversely, firms recruiting director–CEOs in planned successions perform similarly to other firms. We find no evidence that poor firm quality drives these results.

We present a prediction model to forecast corporate defaults. In a theoretical model, under incomplete information in a market with publicly traded equity, we show that our approach must outperform ratings, Altman’s Z-score, and Merton’s distance to default. We reconcile the statistical and structural approaches under a common framework; that is, our approach nests Altman’s and Merton’s approaches as special cases. Empirically, the combined approach is indeed the most powerful predictor, and the numbers of observed defaults align well with the estimated probabilities. With a new transformation method, we obtain cycle-adjusted forecasts that still outperform ratings.

Using a measure of political risk, relative to the United States, that captures unexpected political conditions, we show that political risk is priced in the cross section of currency momentum and contains information beyond other risk factors. Our results are robust after controlling for transaction costs, reversals, and alternative limits to arbitrage. The global political environment affects the profitability of the momentum strategy in the foreign exchange market; investors following such strategies are compensated for the exposure to the global political risk of those currencies they hold, that is, the past winners, and exploit the lower returns of loser portfolios. The risk compensation is mainly justified by the different exposures of foreign currencies in the momentum portfolio to U.S. political shocks, which is the main component of global political risk.