Representative agent models are inconsistent with existing empirical evidence for steep demand curves for individual stocks. This paper resolves the puzzle by proposing that stock prices are instead set by two separate classes of investors. While the market portfolio is still priced by individual investors based on their collective risk aversion, those individual investors also delegate part of their wealth to active money managers, who use that capital to price stocks in the cross section. In equilibrium, the fee charged by active managers has to equal the before-fee alpha they earn. This endogenously determines the amount of active capital and the slopes of demand curves. A calibration of the model reveals that demand curves can be steep enough to match the magnitude of many empirical findings, including the price effects for stocks entering or leaving the S&P 500 index.

Recent empirical studies of mutual fund competition examine the relation between a fund’s performance, the fund manager’s compensation, and the fund manager’s choice of portfolio risk. This paper models a manager’s portfolio choice for compensation rules that can be either a concave, linear, or convex function of the fund’s performance relative to that of a benchmark. For particular compensation structures, a manager increases the fund’s “tracking error” volatility as its relative performance declines. However, declining performance does not necessarily lead the manager to raise the volatility of the fund’s return. The paper presents nonparametric and parametric tests of the relation between mutual fund performance and risk taking for more than 6,000 equity mutual funds over the 1962 to 2006 period. There is a tendency for mutual funds to increase the standard deviation of tracking errors, but not the standard deviation of returns, as their performance declines. This risk-shifting behavior appears more common for funds whose managers have longer tenures.

The objective of this paper is to provide a deeper insight into the links between financial markets and the real economy. To that end, we study the short-term anticipation and response of U.S. stock, Treasury, and corporate bond markets to the first release of surprise U.S. macroeconomic information. Specifically, we focus on the impact of these announcements not only on the level, but also on the volatility and comovement of those assets’ returns. We do so by estimating several extensions of the parsimonious multivariate GARCH-DCC model of Engle (2002) for the excess holding-period returns on seven portfolios of these asset classes. We find that both the process of price formation in each of those financial markets and their interaction appear to be driven by fundamentals. Yet our analysis reveals a statistically and economically significant dichotomy between the reaction of the stock and bond markets to the arrival of unexpected fundamental information. We also show that the conditional mean, volatility, and comovement among stock, Treasury, and corporate bond returns react asymmetrically to the information content of these surprise announcements. Overall, the above results shed new light on the mechanisms by which new information is incorporated into prices within and across U.S. financial markets.

This paper examines time-series patterns of external financing decisions and shows that publicly traded U.S. firms fund a much larger proportion of their financing deficit with external equity when the cost of equity capital is low. The historical values of the cost of equity capital have long-lasting effects on firms’ capital structures through their influence on firms’ historical financing decisions. We also introduce a new econometric technique to deal with biases in estimates of the speed of adjustment toward target leverage. We find that firms adjust toward target leverage at a moderate speed, with a half-life of 3.7 years for book leverage, even after controlling for the traditional determinants of capital structure and firm fixed effects.

Consistent with institutions having an advantage over individuals, we find that newly public firms with the highest levels of institutional investment significantly outperform those with the lowest levels. While prior literature has attributed much of institutions’ higher returns around various corporate events to private information, we find that much of the difference simply reflects better interpretation of readily available public information. Individuals disproportionately invest in the types of firms that earn significantly lower abnormal returns over the long run. Individuals either disregard or misinterpret the relevance of readily available public information, and as a result, they bear the brunt of IPO underperformance.

Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006a) show that stocks with high idiosyncratic return volatility tend to have low future returns. This paper further documents that idiosyncratic volatility is inversely related to future earning shocks, and more importantly, that the return-predictive power of idiosyncratic volatility is induced by its information content about future earnings. We examine various explanations of the triangular relation among idiosyncratic volatility, future earning shocks, and future stock returns. Our results show that the idiosyncratic volatility anomaly is not a simple manifestation of previously documented market anomalies related to excessive extrapolation on firm growth, over-investment tendency, accounting accruals, or investor underreaction to earnings news. On the other hand, there is evidence that the idiosyncratic volatility anomaly is related to corporate selective disclosure, and the anomaly is stronger among stocks with a less sophisticated investor base.

This paper examines the impact of competition on the optimal organization and financing structures in innovation-intensive industries. We show that as an optimal response to competition, firms may choose external organization structures established in collaboration with specialized start-ups where they provide start-up financing from their own resources. As the intensity of the competition to innovate increases, firms move from internal to external organization of projects to increase the speed of product innovation and to obtain a competitive advantage with respect to rival firms in their industry. We also show that as the level of competition increases, firms provide a higher level of financing for externally organized projects in the form of corporate venture capital (CVC). Our results help explain the emergence of organization and financing arrangements such as CVC and strategic alliances, where large established firms organize their projects in collaboration with external specialized firms and provide financing for externally organized projects from their own internal resources.

It has been hypothesized that momentum might be rationally explained as a consequence of the cross-sectional variation of unconditional expected returns. Stocks with relatively high unconditional expected returns will on average outperform in both the portfolio formation period and in the subsequent holding period. We evaluate this explanation by first removing unconditional expected returns for each stock from raw returns and then testing for momentum in the resulting series. We measure the unconditional expected return on each stock as its mean return in the whole sample period. We find momentum effects vanish in demeaned returns.

Dynamic term structure models explain the yield curve variation well but perform poorly in pricing and hedging interest rate options. Most existing option pricing practices take the yield curve as given, thus having little to say about the fair valuation of the underlying interest rates. This paper proposes an m + n model structure that bridges the gap in the literature by successfully pricing both interest rates and interest rate options. The first m factors capture the yield curve variation, whereas the latter n factors capture the interest rate options movements that cannot be effectively identified from the yield curve. We propose a sequential estimation procedure that identifies the m yield curve factors from the LIBOR and swap rates in the first step and the n options factors from interest rate caps in the second step. The three yield curve factors explain over 99% of the variation in the yield curve but account for less than 50% of the implied volatility variation for the caps. Incorporating three additional options factors improves the explained variation in implied volatilities to over 99%.

We develop measures of the management quality of firms and make use of a unique sample of hand-collected data to examine the relationship between the reputation and quality of a firm’s management and its financial and investment policies, a relationship that has so far received little attention in the literature. We hypothesize that better and more reputable managers are able to convey the intrinsic value of their firm more credibly to outsiders, thus reducing the information asymmetry facing their firm in the equity market. Given this, firms with better and more reputable managers will have more access to the equity market, so that we expect lower leverage ratios for these firms. In addition, they will have less need to signal using dividends, so that they will have lower dividend payout ratios. Further, since better managers are likely to select better projects (having a larger net present value (NPV) for any given scale) and to implement them more ably, higher management quality will also be associated with higher levels of investment. We present evidence consistent with the above hypotheses. Our direct tests of the relationship between management quality and asymmetric information also indicate that higher management quality leads to a reduction in the extent of information asymmetry facing a firm in the equity market.

Recently, there has been rapid growth in the assets managed by “hedged mutual funds”—mutual funds mimicking hedge fund strategies. We examine the performance of these funds relative to hedge funds and traditional mutual funds. Despite using similar trading strategies, hedged mutual funds underperform hedge funds. We attribute this finding to hedge funds’ lighter regulation and better incentives. Conversely, hedged mutual funds outperform traditional mutual funds. Notably, this superior performance is driven by managers with experience implementing hedge fund strategies. Our findings have implications for investors seeking hedge-fund-like payoffs at a lower cost and within the comfort of a regulated environment.

We develop a measure (based on the relative slopes of the demand and supply schedules) quantifying the asymmetric presence of liquidity traders in the market: a steeper slope of the demand (supply) schedule indicates a concentration of liquidity traders on the demand (supply) side. Using the opening session of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, we demonstrate the predictive power of our measure. Consistent with theory, we find that the concentration of liquidity traders on the demand (supply) side is negatively (positively) correlated with future returns. We find that liquidity traders are likely to arrive at the market together (commonality).

Prior studies argue that investment by undervalued firms that require external equity is particularly sensitive to stock prices in irrational capital markets. We present a model in which investment can appear to be more sensitive to stock prices when capital markets are rational, but subject to imperfections such as debt overhang, information asymmetries, and financial distress costs. Our empirical tests support the rational (but imperfect) capital markets view. Specifically, investment–stock price sensitivity is related to firm leverage, financial slack, and probability of financial distress, but is not related to proxies for firm undervaluation. Because, in our model, stock prices reflect the net present values (NPVs) of investment opportunities, our results are consistent with rational capital markets improving the allocation of capital by channeling more funds to firms with positive NPV projects.

Recent theoretical models derive return continuation in a setting where investors have heterogeneous beliefs or receive heterogeneous information. This paper tests the link between heterogeneity of beliefs and return continuation in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. Heterogeneity of beliefs about a firm’s fundamentals is measured by the dispersion in analyst forecasts of earnings. The results show that momentum profits are significantly larger for portfolios characterized by higher heterogeneity of beliefs. Predictive cross-sectional regressions show that heterogeneity of beliefs has a positive effect on return continuation after controlling for a stock’s visibility, the speed of information diffusion, uncertainty about fundamentals, information precision, and volatility. The results in this paper are robust to the potential presence of short-sale constraints and are not explained by arbitrage risk.

We examine the relationship between allegations of corporate misconduct and changes in profitability and risk of the alleged offender. Profitability is measured as reported earnings and analysts’ earnings forecasts. Risk is measured as stock return volatility and concordance among analysts’ forecasts. Decreases in earnings and increases in risk are found to accompany allegations of misconduct, and although the results are somewhat sensitive to the earnings and risk metrics used, the changes are found to be consistently greater for related-party offenses. The importance of reputational penalties is underscored by analysis of the association between allegation-related changes in firm value and changes in earnings and risk.

Firms reduce leverage following credit rating downgrades. In the year following a downgrade, downgraded firms issue approximately 1.5%–2.0% less net debt relative to net equity as a percentage of assets compared to other firms. This relationship persists within an empirical model of target leverage behavior. The effect of a downgrade is larger at downgrades to a speculative grade rating and if commercial paper access is affected. In particular, firms downgraded to speculative are about twice as likely to reduce debt as other firms. Rating upgrades do not affect subsequent capital structure activity, suggesting that firms target minimum rating levels.

In light of recent improvements in the transparency of the corporate bond market, we examine the relation between high frequency returns on individual stocks and bonds. In contrast to the authors of previous literature, we employ comprehensive transactions data for both classes of securities. We find that hourly stock returns lead bond returns for nonconvertible junk- and BBB-rated bonds, and that stock returns lead bond returns for convertible bonds in all rating classes. Most of the predictable nonconvertible bonds are issued by companies in financial distress, while the predictable convertible bonds are those with conversion options more deeply in-the-money. These results indicate that the corporate bond market is less informationally efficient than the stock market, notwithstanding the recent improvements in bond market transparency and associated reductions in corporate bond transaction costs.

This paper tests international asset pricing models using firm-level expected returns estimated from an implied cost of capital approach. We show that the implied approach provides clear evidence of economic relations that would otherwise be obscured by the noise in realized returns. Among G-7 countries, expected returns based on implied costs of capital have less than one-tenth the volatility of those based on realized returns. Our tests show that firm-level expected returns increase with world market beta, idiosyncratic volatility, financial leverage, and book-to-market ratios, and decrease with currency beta and firm size.

We consider asset pricing in a monetary economy where liquid assets are held to lower transaction costs. The ensuing model extends the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the consumption CAPM by deriving real money growth as an additional factor determining returns. Empirically, the two model versions compare favorably to other theoretical asset pricing models along several dimensions, supporting the traditional intertemporal asset pricing perspective. A value premium arises because value firms are sensitive to liquidity shocks but growth firms are not. Although no alternative factor drives out the money growth factor, the conditioning CAY factors of Lettau and Ludvigson (2001b) add explanatory power.

Existing approaches to testing for the efficiency of a given portfolio make strong parametric assumptions about investor preferences and return distributions. Stochastic dominance-based procedures promise a useful nonparametric alternative. However, these procedures have been limited to considering binary choices. In this paper we take a new approach that considers all diversified portfolios and thereby introduce a new concept of first-order stochastic dominance (FSD) optimality of a given portfolio relative to all possible portfolios. Using our new test, we show that the U.S. stock market portfolio is significantly FSD nonoptimal relative to benchmark portfolios formed on market capitalization and book-to-market equity ratios. Without appealing to parametric assumptions about the return distribution, we conclude that no nonsatiable investor would hold the market portfolio in the face of the attractive premia of small caps and value stocks.