In a rich, calibrated life-cycle model, we show that well-designed mandatory pension plans significantly improve the welfare of individuals procrastinating on savings, and even improve most rational individuals’ welfare through a return tax advantage and fair annuitization. For a group of heterogeneous savers, in terms of preferences and sophistication, the best plan has contributions of 10% of income from age 30, a glidepath investment strategy, payouts following a variable lifelong annuity, and options to choose a different investment strategy and to modify the annuitization feature. This plan generates an average welfare gain of $175,000 per individual.

Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, this paper documents that companies targeted by activists with better investor protection structures outperform those targeted by those with poor investor protection structures by roughly 10% per year. The outperformance is observed only for active targets for which Schedule 13Ds are filed, not for passive Schedule 13G investments, indicating that the effect is not explained by a superior target-selection ability. The evidence suggests that funds with better investor protection achieve increased profitability and valuation ratio of their targets by reducing agency costs, improving corporate governance, and collaborating with other large institutional investors.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate empirically the effect of the deferred call provisions on corporate bond yields using the conceptual framework of callable and call-free yields developed by Jen and Wert [3]. After reviewing briefly the above-mentioned study in Section I, Section II presents patterns of callable and call-free yields of deferred issues from January 1956 to June 1961 by grades, months of offering, and coupon rates and contrasts them with those of the freely callable issues. Section III further contrasts yields of deferred issues with those of freely-callable ones on a pair comparison basis, while Section IV discusses the implication of the study for both the issuers and the investors.

A market can be imperfectly competitive for a variety of reasons; in the context of an auction or a contract awarding, imperfections may stem from the limited number of bidders involved. Bidders, recognizing that their behavior (or that of others) can affect the market outcome, may adopt strategies that are unlikely to lead to a Pareto efficient allocation. Such inefficiencies can occur in the absence of any collusive behavior on the part of bidders. If barriers to bid entry are removed, and bidders are sufficiently homogeneous, the likelihood increases that bids will reflect full (private) valuations of the auctioned goods. Under these conditions Pareto efficient allocations would be guided by a set of minimum prices: a “sale to the highest bidder” would be transacted at a price approximate to the valuation of the second highest bidder, and contracts would be awarded at the competitive supply price. Even when the number of bidders is restricted, auction procedures can be adopted which will insure efficiency to a degree. This efficiency is achieved by changing the motivations of the available bidders, and by providing incentives for bidders to reveal their full valuations of the objects being auctioned. This paper describes a set of auction procedures which achieve these ends.

We examine the effects of a severe climate event on local firms. Our data include 8,218 business credit reports and a detailed survey of 273 businesses in the area affected by Hurricane Harvey. Delinquent credit balances doubled in areas with the worst flooding, although nonflooded areas also had significant credit impairments. Only independent businesses showed signs of distress; subsidiaries of larger firms did not. Firms were largely uninsured and often were denied credit postdisaster. Many funded recovery informally, such as through friends and family. Our findings suggest that several financial frictions compound the challenges posed by a severe climate event.

Institutional demand for a stock before its earnings announcement is negatively related to subsequent returns. The relation is not attributable to the price pressure of institutional demand and is stronger for stocks with higher information asymmetry and/or greater valuation difficulty. These findings support the notion that overconfident institutions misprice stocks. Following announcements, institutions’ behavior exhibits the outcome-dependent feature of self-attribution bias. Whether they become more overconfident and delay their mispricing correction depends on whether earnings news confirms their preannouncement trades. This behavioral bias also offers a new explanation for the well-known post-earnings-announcement drift.

We identify the unique role of the government bond lending market in collateral transformation during periods of market stress. Using a novel database, we provide evidence that safe assets in the lending market have higher demand, higher borrowing cost, and higher usage of noncash collateral relative to nonsafe assets during stressed market conditions. Moreover, we find that market participants are able to obtain safe assets using relatively low-quality noncash collateral, allowing for collateral transformation. We show that policy interventions by central banks can help reduce safe-asset shortages by returning sought-after safe assets to the market.

We present a dynamic, continuous-time model in which risk averse inside equityholders set a bank’s lending, payout, and financing policies, and the exposure of bank assets to crashes. We examine whether bailouts encourage excessive lending and risk taking compared to liquidation or bail-ins with debt-to-equity conversion or debt write-downs. The effects of the prevailing insolvency resolution mechanism (IRM) on the probability of insolvency, loss in default, and the bank’s value suggest no single IRM is a panacea. We show how a bailout fund financed through a tax on bank dividends resolves bailouts without public money and without distorting insiders’ incentives.

We synthetically create option contracts on a corporate bond index using CDX swaptions, overcoming the limitations that stem from the lack of traded corporate bond options. Our approach allows us to estimate forward-looking moments concerning the corporate bond market in a model-free manner. By constructing an aggregate volatility measure and the associated variance risk premium, we examine the role of volatility risk in the corporate bond market. We highlight that the ex ante conditional second and higher moments we estimate from synthetic corporate bond options carry important implications for credit risk models, providing an extra basis for testing their validity.

The interdependence of loan cost and tangible bank activity is an aspect of the cost of bank debt that has not been treated in the literature. Understanding this interdependence is important for banks in pricing their services, especially as banks adopt more flexible pricing policies. This understanding is crucial for a firm in establishing the true cost of bank borrowing, in comparing bank borrowing with other sources of funds, and in evaluating the firm's banks. It is also important for understanding the firm-bank relationship in general and the cost of capital in particular.

This paper examines the multiperiod capital allocation problem of a corporate division that is subject to ex post financial scrutiny by the parent corporation based upon meeting a specified target rate of return on investment. Using a zero-order decision rule, a deterministic equivalent linear programming model is developed to solve for the division's optimal mix of productive assets and the maturity structure of its debt.

Many firms are short of capital. Investment opportunities offering positive net present values often exceed the amount of available internal financing. Management may either impose a capital budget constraint equal to the amount of internally generated funds or finance externally. Assuming that management chooses the latter, it must choose debt, preferred stock, common stock, or various forms or combinations of these securities. Controversy has surrounded the relative costs of debt and equity financing, but, recognizing the tax advantage of debt financing, most theorists agree that a firm will have some debt in its capital structure. This paper will not attempt to examine the important question of the optimal debt/equity ratio in the firm's capital structure but will assume that management has decided it is prudent to issue additional long-term debt. We will delineate the more modest question of the optimal size and timing of the long-term debt issues.

It is likely that warrants will be used increasingly in the future by corporations both as means of sweetening other securities such as preferred stocks and bonds, and as securities in their own right. Many authors have analyzed the characteristics of warrants from the point of view of investors but attempts to develop a procedure for determining the cost to a corporation of issuing warrants have been lacking. We will find it convenient to measure the yield to a corporation of issuing warrants instead of common stock, rather than determining the percentage cost of warrants analogous to the cost of common stock equity, preferred stock, and interest-bearing debt.

The interdependence of the optimal investment program and capital prices, when capital and other markets are imperfect, has been one of the least tractable problems in capital budgeting. The nature of the problem is described in Amey [1]. Suggested solutions to the problem may be found in Baumol and Quandt [2], Carleton [3], Hirshleifer [4], Lusztig and Schwab [7], and Weingartner [9]. The purpose of this note is to extend the mathematical results reported by Lusztig and Schwab (L & S) and draw implications that will shed light on the controversy.

In [2]Sethi and Thompson illustrated the applications of the maximum principle to solve simple dynamic cash balance problems. In Section IV of that paper, we introduced the idea of penalty function to solve the cash balance problem with bounded state variables arising out of disallowing overdrafts and short selling. This resulted in the adjoint equations containing terms in the state variables x(t) and y(t). We then stated the need for solving a two-point boundary value problem.

We present a rationale for bidder termination provisions that considers their effect on bidders’ and targets’ joint takeover gains. The provision’s inclusion can create value by enabling termination when the target becomes less valuable to the bidder than on its own, but creates a trade-off because termination may also occur when the target is more valuable to the bidder than on its own. This trade-off explains why the provision is included in only some deals, and explains variation in termination fees. Inclusion of the provision is associated with larger combined announcement returns, provided that the termination fee is priced appropriately.

In a recent paper, the author [8] has derived the equilibrium bond pricing equation in a world of uncertain future interest rates assuming that capital gains and losses will be taxed at maturity at capital gains tax rates. In the case of premium bonds (i.e., bonds selling above par), the U.S. tax law allows bondholders to elect to amortize the premium on a straight line basis as a deduction from regular taxable income. For those paying positive tax rates, the amortization option will generally be advantageous compared to taking a capital loss at maturity.

Stocks differ in the variability of their prices; thus, as the level of stock market prices swings periodically, one observes a change in structure as the prices of more volatile issues change relative to those of a more stable character. Here we attempt to empirically establish some of the differentiating characteristics of these volatile issues. In doing so we add to the empirical and analytical work of Fritzemeier [4], Clendenin [2], Latané [7], Malkiel [8], and Heins and Allison [6]. Only the last of these efforts used regression techniques.

I examine whether the time-varying cost of capital is considered in firms’ capital budgeting decisions. For this test, I measure the conditional cost of equity using individual equity option prices. I find that corporate investment responds negatively to fluctuations in the option-implied cost of equity and the weighted average costs of capital. Furthermore, through decomposing marginal $ q $, I reveal that the cost-of-capital elasticity of empirical investment is almost identical to its productivity elasticity, as theory predicts. These findings suggest that firms’ discount rates are updated accurately in practice despite the failure of conventional frameworks, such as factor-based models, in this regard.

In response to how they are compensated, mutual fund managers who are underperforming by mid-year are likely to increase the risk of their portfolios toward the year-end. We argue that an increase in the liquidity of the stocks that managers use to shift risk can lead to an increase in the size of their risky bets. This in turn hurts fund investors by increasing the costs of misaligned incentives associated with delegated portfolio management. We provide both theoretical and empirical results that are consistent with this argument. We use decimalization as an exogenous shock to liquidity to identify causal effects.