This paper investigates hedge funds’ ability to time industry-specific returns and shows that funds’ timing ability in the manufacturing industry improves their future performance, probability of survival, and ability to attract more capital. The results indicate that the best industry-timing hedge funds in the manufacturing sector have the highest return exposure to earnings surprises. This, together with persistently sticky earnings surprises, transparent information environment in regards to earnings releases, and large post-earnings-announcement drift in the manufacturing industry, explain to a great extent why best-timing hedge funds can generate significantly larger future returns compared to worst-timing hedge funds.

The pros and cons of bank mergers and multiple-office banking are in the forefront of bank policy consideration today [8, p. 19] Commercial banks have Joined the industrial and merchandising files., as well as the transportation companies, to sweil a rising tide of merger; The Comptroller of the Currency has reported that nearly 2,000 banks with resources of over $40 billion, were acquired by other banks between 1950 and 1962, inclusive, [47, p. ll].

Perhaps one of the most time-honored of technical market indicators is the Advance-Decline Line. Its predictive powers as a leading indicator of the general market have been written about, and historical data on this index are published in Barron's. However, the validity of this series as a leading indicator has not been subjected to rigorous statistical analysis.

In theory, financial markets promote innovation by selectively allocating capital to high-quality projects. In this article, I show that equity markets can also inhibit innovation. In public firms, I find that short-term equity market declines cause pharmaceutical companies to abandon early-stage drug developments, irrespective of drug quality or changes in a firm’s stock price. I show that financing constraints drive this behavior, highlighting that even short-term market fluctuations can have long-term effects on pharmaceutical innovation and prevent potentially life-saving drugs from progressing to the market.

We document and explain the sharp performance deterioration of smart beta indexes after the corresponding exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are launched for investment. While smart beta is purported to deliver excess returns through factor exposures, the market-adjusted return of smart beta indexes drops from about 3% “on paper” before ETF listings to about −0.50% to −1% after ETF listings. This performance decline cannot be explained by variation in factor premia, strategic timing, or diminishing returns to scale. Instead, we find strong evidence of data mining in the construction of smart beta indexes, which helps ETFs attract flows, as investors respond positively to backtests.

We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more venture capital (VC) investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts fundraising independent of the quality of ideas. However, female participants experience no benefit from exposure to male or female venture capitalists (VCs), which appears related to a reduced propensity to reach out to VCs to whom they were exposed. Our results therefore also demonstrate gender-based differences in the degree to which increased exposure to investors can address networking frictions in venture capital.

We use New York City (NYC) taxi data to identify trips between mutual fund offices and local firm headquarters. NYC funds overweight the stocks of local firms they visit via taxi, and firm visits are associated with superior investment performance. Firm visits are elevated prior to earnings announcements, and mutual fund trades that are associated with firm taxi visits predict earnings surprises. The results are generally stronger when fund and firm executives share educational connections. Additional tests support the conclusion that funds’ local bias and investment performance are driven by portfolio managers’ efforts and ability to actively gather material information.

What are the implications of an aging population for financial stability? To examine this question, we exploit geographic variation in aging across U.S. counties. We establish that banks with higher exposure to aging counties increase loan-to-income ratios. Laxer lending standards lead to higher nonperforming loans during downturns, suggesting higher credit risk. Inspecting the mechanism shows that aging drives risk-taking through two contemporaneous channels: deposit inflows due to seniors’ propensity to save in deposits; and depressed local investment opportunities due to seniors’ lower credit demand. Banks thus look for riskier clients, especially in counties where they operate no branches.

The traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) provides a foundation for the estimation of systematic risk that has been applied extensively in studies of investment performance, market efficiency, predictive models, and capital budgeting, to name only a few. Lee [10] considered a special case of nonlinearities occurring in the estimation of systematic risk within the context of the investment horizon problem. His findings, based on a limited sample, provided significant methodological implications for the estimation process and have received wide readership through republication of the study in a readings text [6].

I welcome the oppostunity to second the analysis of Davies and Ronning [4]. The considerations they raise crop up repeatedly in various contexts of uncertainty analysis and prompt the following remarks dealing with various tonics described in ray title.

Many recent studies of the demand for financial assets have been of an aggregative nature, using time-series data. However, some efforts to disaggregate and rely more heavily on cross-sectional data have yielded substantial improvements in discovering relationships not evident due to aggregation. The purpose of this paper is to continue in this spirit of disaggregation and to estimate the demand for one homogeneous type of financial asset, credit union shares, on a cross-sectional basis.

This article examines the interest rate risk characteristics of a general class of floating rate securities, which includes Chance's securities as a special case. The calculation of duration for Chance's securities is zero, as it should be. Securities in the broader class can have durations that are negative or longer than the period of time that must elapse before the payments can reflect changes in market interest rates. The effect on duration of changes in the parameters of the function relating interest rate shocks to the payments and changes in the slope of the term structure are examined.

Portfolios of stocks issued by small firms are well known to earn rates of return in excess of those commensurate with their market sensitivities. One common explanation for this phenomenon is that small firm stocks are riskier than large firm stocks because less information is available about the former than about the latter. A necessary condition for such an explanation to be valid is that the information effect not be eliminated by combining the individual stocks into portfolios. This paper uses jump-diffusion return models to gauge the impact of information by firm size. The results show that portfolios of small firm stocks are no more prone to information surprises than are portfolios of large firm stocks. However, portfolios of small firm stocks are found to react more severely than portfolios of large firm stocks when surprises do occur.

I construct a new proxy for Tobin’s Q that incorporates the replacement cost of patent capital. This proxy, which I call patent Q, explains up to 62% more variation in investment than other proxies for Q. Furthermore, investment is more sensitive to patent Q than to other proxies for Q. Although investment is predicted more accurately by, and is more sensitive to, patent Q, controlling for patent Q leads to relatively larger, not smaller, cash flow coefficients. All results are stronger in subsamples with more patent capital. Overall, patent Q strengthens the historically weak investment–Q relation.

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.

Material private information transmits through social networks. Using manually collected information on networks of alumni reunion cohorts, we show that hedge fund managers connected to directors of firms engaged in merger deals increase call-option holdings on target firms before deal announcements. Effects are larger when reunion events for connected cohorts occur just before announcements. Independent directors, directors with short tenure, and directors with low stock ownership are more likely to transmit information. Our results are robust to confounding factors and alternative specifications. These findings highlight the role of social networks as channels of private-information dissemination.

We investigate the implications of recovering real-world conditional expectation of return functions using options on the S&P 500 index and Treasury bond futures. First, we construct estimates of the probability of disasters, defined as higher than 6%, 5%, or 4% equity market declines over option expiration cycles. This measure of disaster probability forecasts realized disasters. Second, we employ options on the futures of the 10- and 30-year Treasury bonds to construct estimates for the expected return of bond futures. These measures display forecasting ability for subsequent futures returns beyond the level, slope, and curvature variables extracted from the yield curve.

The literature provides conflicting arguments and mixed results regarding whether capital markets punish managerial myopia. Using managers cutting research and development (R&D) investments to meet short-term earnings goals as a research setting, this study reveals that capital markets penalize managerial myopia, especially for firms with high investor sophistication. Moreover, the negative market reactions to managerial myopia are weaker for firms with overinvestment problems than for those without such problems. Overall, the results support the notion that security markets are not shortsighted. In further analysis, we document that compensation, especially earnings-based compensation, may cause managers to behave myopically. Our study contributes to the literature, reconciling previously mixed findings by capturing managers’ myopic behavior in a more targeted way and showing that markets punish myopic R&D cutting.

I examine whether competition from domestic industry rivals affects firms’ proclivity to undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) and their country location choices. I find that competition affects foreign production decisions and the geography of international investments. While firms enduring stiffer competition are significantly less likely to undertake FDI, this effect is heterogeneous across firms. Competition deters FDI more strongly when costs are heavier, whereas it has weaker effects when efficiency is higher, growth opportunities are valuable, and cash reserves are higher. FDI location models suggest that when going abroad, firms facing stronger competition are more likely to pursue economies of productivity and taxation.

We investigate whether incentives to join the Fortune 500 affect corporate decisions. Firms closer to the cutoff appear to take actions to join the list by engaging in more mergers and acquisitions activity, bidding for larger targets, and paying higher takeover premia. Further, the relation is stronger for firms with more-entrenched chief executive officers, and the stock market reaction to bids is worse when bidders are close to the Fortune 500’s cutoff. A 1994 methodological change by Fortune acts as an exogenous shock for identification. Our results suggest that firms try to increase revenues to join the Fortune 500 but that such actions adversely affect shareholders.