This paper examines the impact of financial sponsor competition on corporate buyers. We find that corporate acquirers who purchase targets that financial buyers also bid on outperform corporate acquirers who buy targets bid on by corporate firms only. Deal characteristics, acquirer abilities, and observable target characteristics cannot explain this difference in returns. Corporate acquirers have higher returns when they follow a first bid by a financial buyer rather than a first bid by another corporate buyer. The results suggest that financial bidders identify targets with high potential for value improvement and winning corporate bidders are competent in exploiting this potential.

This paper presents the first theoretical analysis of the choice of firms between “preparing” and not preparing the equity market in advance of a possible dividend cut. In our model, insiders have private information about their firm’s intermediate cash flow as well as about the net present value of its growth opportunity. We show that, in equilibrium, firms in temporary financial difficulties but with good long-term growth prospects are more likely to prepare the market in advance of dividend cuts, while those with permanently declining earnings are less likely to prepare the market. Our model generates several new testable predictions.

In this paper we study the economic value and statistical significance of asset return predictability, based on a wide range of commonly used predictive variables. We assess the performance of dynamic, unconditionally efficient strategies, first studied by Hansen and Richard (1987) and Ferson and Siegel (2001), using a test that has both an intuitive economic interpretation and known statistical properties. We find that using the lagged term spread, credit spread, and inflation significantly improves the risk-return trade-off. Our strategies consistently outperform efficient buy-and-hold strategies, both in and out of sample, and they also incur lower transactions costs than traditional conditionally efficient strategies.

Using a new variable based on a model of dividend smoothing, we find that dividend growth is highly predictable and that cash flow news contributes importantly to return variability. Cash flow betas derived from this predictability are central to explaining the size effect in the cross section of returns. However, they do not explain the value effect; this is explained by noise betas. We also find that the relative importance of cash flow news in explaining recent stock price run-ups and subsequent declines increases when cash flow news is estimated directly.

Current attempts to reform financial markets presume that shareholder empowerment benefits shareholders. We investigate the wealth effects associated with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. Our results are not in line with shareholder empowerment creating value: The average daily abnormal returns surrounding events that increase (decrease) the probability of the proposal’s passage are significantly negative (positive). Furthermore, given an increase in the probability of the proposal’s passage, firms whose shareholders are more likely to use the rule to nominate directors experience more negative abnormal returns.

Open market share repurchase announcements are commonly associated with equity undervaluation, but their signal about firm value can often be misleading. We conjecture that executives who buy shares of their firm before an announcement add credibility to the undervaluation signal. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that announcement returns are positively related to past insider purchases, especially for firms that are priced less efficiently. Firms whose insiders bought more shares are also more likely to complete their repurchase plans. Finally, we find that insider purchases predict post-announcement stock returns.

Well-performing default predictions show good discrimination and calibration. Discrimination is the ability to separate defaulters from nondefaulters. Calibration is the ability to make unbiased forecasts. I derive novel discrimination and calibration statistics to verify forecasts expressed in terms of probability under dependent observations. The test statistics’ asymptotic distributions can be derived in analytic form. Not accounting for cross correlation can result in the rejection of actually well-performing predictions, as shown in an empirical application. I demonstrate that forecasting errors must be serially uncorrelated. As a consequence, my multiperiod tests are statistically consistent.

This paper analyzes the loss allocation to first, second, and third loss positions in European collateralized debt obligation transactions. The quality of the underlying asset pool plays a predominant role for the loss allocation. A lower asset pool quality induces the originator to take a higher first loss position, but, in a synthetic transaction, a smaller third loss position. The share of expected default losses, borne by the first loss position, is largely independent of asset pool quality but lower in securitizations of corporate loans than in those of corporate bonds. Originators with a good rating and low Tobin’s Q prefer synthetic transactions.