Despite the overwhelming trend in mutual funds toward team management, empirical studies find no performance benefits for this phenomenon. We show it is caused by large discrepancies in reported managerial structures in Center for Research in Security Prices and Morningstar Principia data sets versus U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, resulting in up to 50-basis-points underestimation of the team impact on fund returns. Using more accurate Morningstar Direct data, we find that team-managed funds outperform single-managed funds across various performance metrics. The relation between team size and fund performance is nonlinear. Also, team-managed funds take on no more risk than single-managed funds. Overall, team management benefits fund industry performance.

We compare chief executive officer (CEO) turnover in public and large private firms. Public firms have higher turnover rates and exhibit greater turnover–performance sensitivity (TPS) than private firms. When we control for pre-turnover performance, performance improvements are greater for private firms than for public firms. We investigate whether these differences are due to differences in quality of accounting information, the CEO candidate pool, CEO power, board structure, ownership structure, investor horizon, or certain unobservable differences between public and private firms. One factor contributing to public firms’ higher turnover rates and greater TPS appears to be investor myopia.

I model the decision of an informed early-stage venture capital (VC) investor that considers involving an uninformed VC or venture lending (VL) investor to finance the late stage. Early-stage VC investors that own high-quality value companies tend to signal their quality and they frequently turn to VL investors. Early-stage VC investors prefer VC if the proportion of high-quality companies in the population is high, if their companies have a high upside potential, if they can benefit from the value that late-stage VC investors add, or if uncertainty is high. I find empirical evidence consistent with these predictions.

This paper documents an increase in the comovement between credit default swap (CDS) spread changes during the 2007–2009 crisis and investigates the source of that increase. One possible explanation is that comovement increased because fundamental values became more correlated. However, I find that changes in fundamentals account for only 23% of the increase in covariance. The remaining increase is attributed to changes in liquidity and the market price of default risk. In contrast, counterparty risk played an insignificant role. Although both contributed, the increase in covariance was driven more by variation in exposures than factor variance–covariance.

This research examines the relations between tournament-based incentives and corporate cash holdings and the value of cash. We find robust evidence that tournament-based incentives are positively related to cash holdings and the value of cash. Moreover, the effect of tournament-based incentives on the value of cash is stronger for financially constrained firms. Our evidence indicates that as tournament-based incentives motivate riskier corporate policy choices that lead to not only larger expected shareholder value but also greater cash-flow uncertainty, firms increase cash holdings to cushion potential liquidity shortfalls that may cause underinvestment.

This research examines the relationship between policy uncertainty and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We find that policy uncertainty is negatively related to firm acquisitiveness and positively related to the time it takes to complete M&A deals. In addition, policy uncertainty motivates acquirers to use stock for payment and to pay lower bid premiums. Acquirers, on average, create larger shareholder value from M&A deals undertaken during periods of high policy uncertainty, which is attributable to their prudence as well as the wealth transfer from the financially constrained targets to acquirers.

We examine the value consequences of corporate social responsibility through the lens of institutional shareholders. We find a sharp asymmetry between corporate policies that mitigate the firm’s exposure to environmental risk and those that enhance its perceived environmental friendliness (“greenness”). Institutional investors shun stocks with high environmental risk exposure, which we show have lower valuations, as predicted by risk management theory. These findings suggest that corporate environmental policies that mitigate environmental risk exposure create shareholder value. In contrast, firms that increase greenness do not create shareholder value and are also shunned by institutional investors.

Events that disrupt customer–supplier relationships pose a source of risk for suppliers that depend on a customer for a large portion of their revenues. We identify the replacement of a customer’s chief executive officer (CEO) as a disruptive event that results in suppliers losing substantial sales. These losses are greater when an incumbent customer CEO is more likely to be entrenched and stem largely from the successor divesting assets. Finally, we document that losses in sales following a customer CEO turnover lead to declines in a supplier’s financial performance and that suppliers experience negative abnormal stock returns to announcements of customer CEO departures.

Does more competition lead to more information production and greater investment efficiency? This question is largely unexplored in the finance literature. This article provides both a model and a series of extensive empirical tests. The model features a 2-stage Bayesian game in differentiated products market competition. We find that competition causes firms to acquire less information and investments to become more inefficient relative to a first-best case with the same market structure. Empirically, the panel regression analysis provides strong support for the theory and shows that investment is more efficient in concentrated industries.

We model conditional market beta and alpha as flexible functions of state variables identified via a formal variable-selection procedure. In the post-1963 sample, the beta of the value premium comoves strongly with unemployment, inflation, and the price–earnings ratio in a countercyclical manner. We also uncover a novel nonlinear dependence of alpha on business conditions: It falls sharply and even becomes negative during severe economic downturns but is positive and flat otherwise. The conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) performs better than the unconditional CAPM, but this does not fully explain the value premium. Our findings are consistent with a conditional CAPM with rare disasters.

We develop an estimation approach based on a modified expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and a mixture of normal distributions associated with skill groups to assess performance in hedge funds. By allowing luck to affect both skilled and unskilled funds, we estimate the number of skill groups, the fraction of funds from each group, and the mean and variability of skill within each group. For each individual fund, we propose a performance measure combining the fund’s estimated alpha with the cross-sectional distribution of fund skill. In out-of-sample tests, an investment strategy using our performance measure outperforms those using estimated alpha and t-statistic.

Short sellers trade more on days with qualitative news, that is, news containing fewer numbers. We show that this behavior is not informationally motivated but can be explained by short sellers exploiting higher liquidity on such days. We document that liquidity and noise trading increase in the presence of qualitative news, enabling short sellers to better disguise their informed trades. Natural experiments support our findings. Qualitative news has a bigger effect on short sellers’ trading after a decrease in liquidity following the stock’s deletion from the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and a smaller effect when investor attention is distracted by the Olympic Games.

We investigate the effect of information asymmetry on corporate tax avoidance. Using a difference-in-differences matching estimator to assess the effects of changes in analyst coverage caused by broker closures and mergers, we find that firms avoid tax more aggressively after a reduction in analyst coverage. We further find that this effect is mainly driven by firms with higher existing tax-planning capacity (e.g., tax-haven presence), smaller initial analyst coverage, and a smaller number of peer firms. Moreover, the effect is more pronounced in industries where reputation matters more and in firms subject to less monitoring from tax authorities.

Traditional methods of asset allocation (such as mean–variance optimization) are not adequate for option portfolios because the distribution of returns is non-normal and the short sample of option returns available makes it difficult to estimate their distribution. We propose a method to optimize a portfolio of European options, held to maturity, with a myopic objective function that overcomes these limitations. In an out-of-sample exercise incorporating realistic transaction costs, the portfolio strategy delivers a Sharpe ratio of 0.82 with positive skewness. This performance is mostly obtained by exploiting mispricing between options and not by loading on jump or volatility risk premia.

This article analyzes the informative trading of professional money managers within a rational-expectations equilibrium model in which managers care about their performance relative to their peer group. I find that the existence of uninformed managers causes informed managers with relative performance concerns to trade less informatively, engendering less informative prices. When managers are differentially informed, they need to forecast the average performance based on private signals, and each manager may place more weight on the private signal if the signal provides good information about the average performance. The price aggregates those signals and thus becomes more informative.

This paper develops a two-country asset pricing model with defaultable firms and governments. This model shows that higher sovereign credit risk in a country depresses equity prices internationally and increases their volatility. The effect is strongest during adverse economic conditions and when firms are close to financial distress. A structural estimation provides evidence that sovereign default risk in Europe affects European and U.S. stock markets through the threat of an economic slowdown.

We examine commercial real estate fund managers’ abilities to generate abnormal profits through selection of outperforming property submarket segments or through the timing of entry into and exit from submarkets. The vast majority of portfolio managers exhibit little market timing ability, with the exception of non-NYSE real estate investment trusts after the financial crisis. A substantial fraction of managers seems able to successfully select property submarkets. Selection performance exhibits significant persistence. Managers that are active in more liquid markets tend to exhibit better timing performance, while managers exhibiting better selection ability appear to be active in less liquid markets.

We examine whether financing commitments from a target firm’s financial advisor, in the form of stapled financing, provide certification of target value. Using a data set of leveraged buyouts spanning 2002–2011, and addressing endogeneity issues, we find that stapled financing has significant positive effects on sellers’ shareholder wealth, especially for targets suffering from greater adverse selection. Stapled financing facilitates deal financing by allowing buyers to obtain lower-cost and longer-maturity debt, and it is positively associated with bidding intensity. Investment banks offering stapled financing appear to trade off higher expected advisory fees against loss of lending efficiency ex post.

This paper investigates investor disagreement and clientele effects in performance evaluation by developing a measure that considers the best potential clienteles of mutual funds. In an incomplete market under law-of-one-price (LOP) and no-good-deal conditions, we obtain an upper bound on admissible performance measures that identifies the most favorable alpha. Empirically, we find that a reasonable investor disagreement leads to generally positive performance for the best clienteles. Performance disagreement by investors can be significant enough to change the average evaluation of mutual funds from negative to positive, depending on the clienteles.

We examine whether internal funds matter for investment when the measurement error in q is addressed. By carefully employing methodologies that tackle the measurement error in q, we show that cash flow is a significant determinant of investment. We also find that an analyst-forecast-based q measure is not superior to a stock-market-based q measure. We further propose an approach that uses two alternative proxies of q as instruments for addressing measurement error. Our evidence indicates that instrumental-variables-type generalized method of moments estimators yield empirically well-specified models.