Post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is stronger in firms that release earnings on days when market returns are higher in magnitude. This drift remains robust after controlling for previously documented factors such as Friday releases, the number of simultaneous releases, and price delay measure. Negative earnings surprises drive this drift, and the drift is more pronounced among small stocks, value stocks, and stocks that have low analyst following. Slower analyst response to earnings contributes to the drift. These findings are consistent with investors paying more attention to market information and less attention to firm-specific information due to attention constraints.

We examine the role of relationship-based resource allocations during the approval process of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) in the Chinese capital market. Our results show that guanxi-based relationships significantly increase the likelihood of SEO approvals, particularly for suspect SEO applicants with abnormal levels of earnings management (EM), related-party transactions (RPTs), and intercompany loans. More importantly, we find that guanxi-influenced SEO firms have significantly poorer performance in the post-SEO period, which indicates that it results in inefficient resource allocations. Overall, our evidence suggests that relationship-based resource allocations lead to negative spillover effects that impose social welfare losses.

We compare major factor models and find that the Stambaugh and Yuan (2016) 4-factor model is the overall winner in the time-series domain. The Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2015) q-factor model takes second place and the Fama and French (2015) 5-factor model and the Barillas and Shanken (2018) 6-factor model jointly take third place. The pairwise cross-sectional R2 and the multiple model comparison tests show that the Hou et al. (2015) q-factor model, the Fama and French (2015) 5-factor and 4-factor models, and the Barillas and Shanken (2018) 6-factor model take equal first place in the horse race.

When borrowers are delinquent, senior debtholders prefer liquidation, whereas junior debtholders prefer to maintain their option value by delaying resolution or modifying the loan. In the mortgage market, a conflict of interest (“holdup”) arises when servicers of securitized senior liens are also the owners of the junior liens on the same property. We show that holdup servicers are able to delay action on the first-lien mortgage. When they do act, servicers are more likely to choose resolutions that maintain their option value, favoring modification and soft foreclosures over outright foreclosures. Holdup behavior is more likely to result in borrower self-curing.

This article provides a comprehensive examination of the time-series behavior of relationship banks around and during borrower distress. Relationship and outside loans have similar interest rates during distress and even 2 years prior to distress. Relative to outside loans in distress, relationship loans in distress have lower maturity. The fraction of bank lending given by relationship banks reduces during borrower distress. Overall, borrowers in distress do not derive benefits from relationship banks. These findings are inconsistent with models that suggest banks have an implicit commitment to help their borrowers in distress due to reputation concerns.

This article proposes the entropy of m2 (m is the stochastic discount factor) as a metric to evaluate asset-pricing models. We develop a bound on the entropy of m2 when m correctly prices a finite number of returns and consider models that pass the lower bound on m, yet fail the lower bound on m2. Interpreting our results, we elaborate on the distinction between the entropy of m2 versus the entropy of m. We further show that the entropy of m2 represents an upper bound on the expected excess (log) return of the security with the payoff of m.

We examine whether speed is an important characteristic of traders who anticipate local price trends. These anticipatory participants correctly trade prior to the overall market and systematically act before other participants. They use manual and algorithmic order entry methods, but most are not fast enough to be high frequency traders (HFTs). Those anticipating price trends have impacts as if they are informed traders, while the case for anticipatory participants affecting the volume of other traders is rejected. A follow-up sample shows significant attrition in accounts and difficulty maintaining the anticipatory strategies. To identify anticipatory traders, we devise novel methods to isolate local price trends using order book data from the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures market.

This article investigates the impact of political uncertainty on contractual lending terms using a large sample of syndicated loans and a within-firm estimation approach to achieve identification. Firms pay 7 basis points (bps) more on loans originated when their lenders are undergoing an election relative to when their lenders are not undergoing an election. Lenders from less financially developed countries are more likely to pass political uncertainty costs to borrowers. Consistent with electoral uncertainty driving this premium, the most contested elections have the largest impact (17 bps). Overall, political uncertainty leads to a tangible increase in firms’ financing costs.

The intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) predicts that an unobservable factor capturing changes in expected market returns should be priced in the cross section. My Bayesian framework accounts for uncertainty in the intertemporal risk factor and gauges the effects of prior information about investment opportunities on model inferences. Whereas an uninformative prior specification produces weak evidence that intertemporal risk is priced, incorporating prior information about market-return predictability generates a large space of ex ante reasonable priors in which the estimated intertemporal risk factor is positively priced. Overall, the cross-sectional tests reject the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and indicate support for the ICAPM.

This study examines the consequences of conflicts between creditors. Using the setting of debt covenant violations, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of banks’ interventions on their borrowers’ trade credit. The results show that trade credit experiences a substantial decline when banks intervene in the borrowing firm following covenant violations. The decline is mitigated by the presence of dependent suppliers and exacerbated by banks’ incentives to exercise control rights. Such externalities are reflected in the loan-contract design. Borrowing firms sign less restrictive loan contracts when they rely more on trade credit or trade creditors.

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the relation between the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 and corporate innovation: firms with a public float under $75 million can delay compliance with Section 404 of the act. We find a significant decrease in the number of patents and patent citations for firms that are subject to Section 404 compliance relative to firms that are not. This relation is more pronounced when firms are financially constrained and when firms face high litigation risk. Overall, our evidence suggests that SOX imparts real costs to the economy by decreasing corporate innovativeness.

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.

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of fire sale risk, the clustering of insurance companies in a bond has significant explanatory power for yield spreads, controlling for liquidity, credit risk, and other factors. The effect of insurer clustering on bond yield spreads is more evident for bonds held to a greater extent by capital-constrained insurance companies, those with ratings closer to National Association of Insurance Commissioners risk categories with larger capital requirements, and during the financial crisis.

We study at-the-market (ATM) equity offerings, which are direct share issuances sold in the secondary market that forgo underwriters and “dribble-out” shares over time rather than raising them all at once. Enabled in 2008, their use has increased dramatically, and in 2016, their incidence and total proceeds were, respectively, 63% and 26% of those for seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Determinants of firms’ choice between ATMs and SEOs are consistent with the costly certification hypothesis of Chemmanur and Fulghieri (1994). We also find that 65% of ATM proceeds are used to stockpile cash compared to 84% of SEO proceeds.

Traditional seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) elicit short selling from traders trying to increase offering discounts. Such short selling is more difficult for shelf offerings because the time between their announcement and issuance tends to be shorter. We predict and find that firms with higher short-selling potential (SSP) are more likely to choose shelf over traditional SEOs. This result is robust to alternative proxies for SSP and other sensitivity tests. Further analysis suggests that shelf issuers aim to mitigate the threat of manipulative short selling. Our findings add to a growing literature showing that short selling has a real impact on corporate finance decisions.

We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in the spirit of Merton (1971), in which subjects dynamically choose their portfolio allocation between a risk-free and risky asset. Using the optimal allocation of an investor with hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) utility, we fit the experimental choices to characterize the risk profile of our participants. Despite substantial heterogeneity, decreasing absolute risk aversion and increasing relative risk aversion are the predominant types. We also find some evidence of increased risk taking after a gain. Finally, the session level risk attitudes show a different profile than the individual descriptions of risk attitudes.

We propose a single-factor asset pricing model based on an indicator function of consumption growth being less than its endogenous certainty equivalent. This certainty equivalent is derived from generalized disappointment-aversion preferences, and it is located approximately 1 standard deviation below the conditional mean of consumption growth. Our single-factor model can explain the cross section of expected returns for size, value, reversal, profitability, and investment portfolios at least as well as the Fama–French multifactor models. Our results show strong empirical support for asymmetric preferences and question the effectiveness of the smooth utility framework, which is traditionally used in consumption-based asset pricing.

In a model where investors disagree about the fundamentals of two stocks, the state-price density depends on investor disagreements for both stocks, especially the larger stock. This implies that disagreement among investors in a large firm has a spillover effect on the pricing of other stocks owned by these investors. The pricing effects of investor disagreements crucially depend on the average belief biases. Empirical findings support the novel model prediction of a disagreement spillover effect and help reconcile some mixed evidence in the literature.

We propose a new approach based on a generalization of the logit model to improve prediction accuracy in U.S. bank failures. Mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) is introduced in the context of a logistic regression. We also mitigate the class-imbalance problem in data and adjust the classification accuracy evaluation. In applying the suggested model to the period from 2004 to 2016, we show that it correctly classifies significantly more bank failure cases than the classic logit model, in particular for long-term forecasting horizons. Some of the largest recent bank failures in the United States that had been previously misclassified are now correctly predicted.

We investigate whether access to information prior to an initial public offering (IPO) generates a trading advantage after the IPO. We find that limited partners (LPs) of lead venture capital funds obtain high returns when they invest in newly listed stocks backed by their funds. These returns are not explained by LPs’ differing stock-picking abilities, and they are higher when LPs’ information advantage over the public is higher. LPs are more likely to invest if they have an information advantage, and access to information eliminates the familiarity bias that they display otherwise.