We examine the suitability of using overnight returns to measure firm-specific investor sentiment by analyzing whether they possess characteristics expected of a sentiment measure. We document short-term overnight-return persistence, consistent with existing evidence of short-term persistence in the share demand of sentiment-influenced investors. We find that short-term persistence is stronger for harder-to-value firms, consistent with existing evidence that sentiment plays a larger role for such firms. We show that stocks with high (low) overnight returns underperform (outperform) over the longer term, consistent with prior evidence of temporary sentiment-driven mispricing. Overall, our evidence supports using overnight returns to measure firm-specific sentiment.

We propose a new multi-factor model for international stock returns that includes size, value, and momentum factor portfolios and that builds them in a partial-segmentation capital market framework. Accounting for externalities driven by the incomplete accessibility to stocks and stock markets, our model not only captures strong common variation in international stock returns but also achieves low pricing errors and rejection rates relative to pure segmentation and pure integration models. This partial-segmentation approach is evaluated using monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 developed and emerging market countries over 2 decades and for a wide variety of test assets.

We investigate how financial contracting interacts with lending-channel effects by tracing the anatomy of a credit supply shock using micro-level data from a multinational bank. Borrowers with stronger lending relationships, higher nonlending revenues, and those that pledge collateral, especially outside assets and real estate, experience less credit rationing. Consistent with a tightening of financing constraints post shock, borrower composition shifts toward larger and less risky firms, and loans exhibit higher collateralization rates. Our analysis highlights the value of relationships and suggests that relationship banking is a channel through which borrowers can mitigate lending-channel effects.

Pursuing delinquent borrowers requires considerable effort, and creditors may lack the incentive to exert this costly effort in uncompetitive banking sectors. To examine this, we use a uniquely large data set of public and private corporate bankruptcy filings spanning a banking-sector reform that deregulated bank entry across different regions of India. We find that increased banking competition is associated with more firms seeking a stay on assets, a decline in bankruptcy duration, and a shift toward workouts rather than liquidations. The results are consistent with creditors exerting greater effort to pursue delinquent firms and resolve bankruptcies more quickly when competition increases.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The extant literature suggests that one of the main causes of the recent financial crisis was the excessive use of short-term debt by banks. Using a large sample of banks, we find that increases in repurchase agreements (repos) were recognized by external capital markets to increase bank risk in the pre-crisis period. In the crisis, we find a negative relationship between repos and risk. We attribute this result to evidence suggesting that “good” banks were able to continue funding their repos, whereas “bad” banks had to significantly decrease their repo funding.

Between 2009 and 2014, 75% of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) were announced and issued overnight, compared to 27% between 2000 and 2008. Overnight issuers obtain a higher SEO offer price because they experience more favorable pre-offer returns. Consistent with these favorable returns being due to the avoidance of pre-issue selling pressure, non-overnight issuers experience a 2.5% pre-issue stock-price decline that reverses within 7 days. This post-issue reversal is increasing in SEO offer size and bigger following large pre-issue price declines. In contrast, returns following overnight offerings are less positive and unrelated to SEO offer size or pre-issue returns.

We investigate how chief executive officers’ (CEOs) risk incentive (VEGA) affects firm innovation. To establish causality, we exploit compensation changes instigated by the FAS 123R accounting regulation in 2005 that mandated stock option expensing at fair values. Our identification tests indicate a positive and causal effect of CEOs’ VEGA on innovation activities. Furthermore, dampened managerial risk-taking incentive after the implementation of FAS 123R leads to a significant reduction in innovation related to firms’ core business and explorative inventions. It implies that managers diversify their innovation portfolios and decrease explorative inventions to curtail business risk when their risk-taking incentive is reduced.

We measure market reactions to announcements concerning liquidity regulation, a key innovation in the Basel framework. Our initial results show that liquidity regulation attracts negative abnormal returns. However, the price responses are less pronounced when coinciding announcements concerning capital regulation are backed out, suggesting that markets do not consider liquidity regulation to be binding. Bank- and country-specific characteristics also matter. Liquid balance sheets and high charter values increase abnormal returns whereas smaller long-term funding mismatches reduce abnormal returns. Banks located in countries with large government debt and tight interbank conditions or with prior domestic liquidity regulation display lower abnormal returns.

This paper specifies term structure dynamics by a recursive cascade of heterogeneously persistent factors. The cascade naturally orders economic shocks by their adjustment speeds, and generates smooth interest-rate curves in closed form. For a class of specifications, the number of parameters is invariant to the size of the state space, and the term structure converges to a stochastic limit as the state dimension goes to infinity. High-dimensional specifications fit observed term structure almost perfectly, match the observed low correlation between movements in different maturities, and produce stable interest-rate forecasts that outperform lower-dimensional specifications.