We conduct a comprehensive study of commonality in liquidity using intraday spread and depth data from 47 stock exchanges. We find that firm-level changes in liquidity are significantly influenced by exchange-level changes across most of the world’s stock exchanges. Emerging Asian exchanges have exceptionally strong commonality, while those of Latin America exhibit little if any commonality. After documenting the pervasive role of commonality within individual exchanges, we examine commonality across exchanges. We find evidence of a distinct, global component in bid-ask spreads and depths. Local (exchange-level) sources of commonality represent roughly 39% of the firm’s total commonality in liquidity, while global sources contribute an additional 19%. We also investigate potential sources of exchange-level and global commonality. We show that commonality is driven by both domestic and U.S. macroeconomic announcements.

We study the impact of exchange rate fluctuations and political risk on the risk premiums reflected in cross-sections of individual equity returns from Mexico, a country that has experienced significant monetary and political turbulence. Indicators from Mexico's currency and sovereign debt markets are employed as proxies for exchange rate and political risks. We find some evidence of equity market premiums for exposure to these risks. The results suggest common factors in emerging market equity, currency, and sovereign debt markets, and have several implications for corporate and portfolio management and for the use of emerging market data by researchers.

We develop a theory to show how external and internal corporate governance mechanisms affect innovation. We predict a U-shaped relation between innovation and external takeover pressure, which arises from the interaction between expected takeover premia and private benefits of control. Using ex ante and ex post innovation measures, we find strong empirical support for the predicted relation. We exploit the variation in takeover pressure created by the passage of antitakeover laws across different states. Innovation is fostered either by an unhindered market for corporate control or by antitakeover laws that are severe enough to effectively deter takeovers.

This paper shows that prospect theory is unlikely to explain the disposition effect. Prospect theory predicts that the propensity to sell a stock declines as its price moves away from the purchase price in either direction. Trading data, on the other hand, show that the propensity to sell jumps at zero return, but it is approximately constant over a wide range of losses and increasing or constant over a wide range of gains. Further, the pattern of realized returns does not seem to stem from optimal after-tax portfolio rebalancing, a belief in mean-reverting returns, or investors acting on target prices.

This study provides evidence that differential interpretations are an important stimulus for speculative trading. We measure differential interpretations using data on analysts' revisions of forecasts of annual earnings after the announcement of quarterly earnings that are components of those annual earnings numbers. We find two conditions under which differential interpretations play a significant role in explaining trading. First, we present empirical evidence supporting Kandel and Pearson's (1995) argument that trading coincident with small price changes reflects investors' differential interpretations of information. This evidence is important because it is inconsistent with conventional models of trade that assume homogeneous interpretations. Second, we also find that differential interpretations explain a significant amount of the trading occurring in a sample where trading volume is higher than the (firm-specific) non-announcement period average. This result is consistent with informed traders acting on their differential interpretations when there is enough liquidity trading to help camouflage their own information-based trades. In sum, the study's results confirm Bachelier's (1900) intuition that differential interpretations are an important stimulus for trading.

We explain the currency carry trade (CT) performance using an asset pricing model in which factor loadings are regime dependent rather than constant. Empirical results show that a typical CT strategy has much higher exposure to the stock market and is mean reverting in regimes of high foreign exchange volatility. The findings are robust to various extensions. Our regime-dependent pricing model provides significantly smaller pricing errors than a traditional model. Thus, the CT performance is better explained by a time-varying systematic risk that increases in volatile markets, suggesting a partial resolution of the uncovered interest parity puzzle.

Ex ante predictions of the riskiness of returns on common stocks — or, in more general terms, predictions of the probability distribution of returns — can be based on fundamental (accounting) data for the firm and also on the previous history of stock prices. In this article, we attempt to combine both sources of information to provide efficient predictions of the probability distribution of returns. We predict two parameters of the distribution of returns for each security in each year: the response to the overall market return (β), and the variance of the part of risk, specific to the security, that is uncorrelated with the market return. A cross section of time series data on returns and accounting variables, taken primarily from the Compustat tape, is used. Several recent developments in statistical methodology are applied.

Contrary to Baker and Wurgler (2002), I find that the importance of historical average market-to-book ratios in leverage regressions is not due to past equity market timing. Although equity transactions may be timed to equity market conditions, they do not have significant long lasting effects on capital structure. Debt transactions exhibit timing patterns that are unlikely to induce a negative relation between market-to-book ratios and leverage. I also find that historical average market-to-book ratios have significant effects on current financing and investment decisions, implying that they contain information about growth opportunities not captured by current market-to-book ratios.

We find that the market’s recent cross-sectional dispersion in stock returns is positively related to the subsequent value book-to-market premium and negatively related to the subsequent momentum premium. The partial relation between return dispersion (RD) and the subsequent value and momentum premiums remains strong when controlling for macroeconomic state variables suggested by the literature. Our findings are consistent with recent theoretical insights and empirical evidence that suggest that the market’s RD may serve as a leading countercyclical state variable, that the value premium is countercyclical, and that the momentum premium is procyclical.

This article investigates differences in yields on identical Treasury notes and bills and shows that they reflect differences in liquidity (immediacy) risk and taxes. It proposes an empirical measure for differences in the liquidity risk of notes and bills: the volatility of the underlying rate times the ratio of bills' turnover to notes' turnover. Because differential taxes affect sellers but not buyers of bills and notes, the results reject, free of informational problems, the hypothesis that the notes' demand curve is horizonta. Note-bill yield differences also decrease with inventories of notes—the less liquid asset.

We study how securities analysts influence managers’ use of different types of earnings management. To isolate causality, we employ a quasi-experiment that exploits exogenous reductions in analyst following resulting from brokerage house mergers. We find that managers respond to the coverage loss by decreasing real earnings management while increasing accrual manipulation. These effects are significantly stronger among firms with less coverage and for firms close to the zero-earnings threshold. Our causal evidence suggests that managers use real earnings management to enhance short-term performance in response to analyst pressure, effects that are not uncovered when focusing solely on accrual-based methods.

How does trust affect business contracting at the firm level? We analyze the case of foreign high-tech companies investing in China, where the risk of expropriation of their intellectual property is high. We find that firms mitigate this type of risk by taking local trustworthiness into account when making investment decisions. Firms prefer to invest in regions where local partners and employees are considered more trustworthy; they are also more likely to establish joint ventures and to make greater research and development investments. We employ instrumental variable regressions and dynamic panel generalized method of moments estimators to alleviate endogeneity concerns and control for time-invariant heterogeneity.

Theory indicates that frictions (e. g., information and transaction costs) could account for the lower than expected stock market participation rates. This paper examines the hypothesis that there has been a fundamental change in participation and links this change to the reduction of these frictions by the advent of the Internet. Using panel data on household participation rates over the past decade, the results show computer/Internet using households raised participation substantially more than non-computer using households. The increased probability of participation was equivalent to having over $27,000 in additional household income or over two more mean years of education.

We investigate performance effects for China's listed firms when there is a change in the controlling shareholder. These changes include ownership transfers from one state entity to another state entity and from a state entity to a private entity. We find positive performance effects when control is passed to a private entity. In contrast, when the transfer is made to another branch of the state, there is little change in performance. The stock market responds positively to a change in control, with the largest effect observed for private transfers. Our results suggest the Chinese government should continue to sell down its share ownership in listed firms as the transfer of control to private owners enhances corporate profitability and efficiency. Moreover, to help ownership reform, China should encourage an active market for corporate control.

Are firms more resilient to systemic banking crises in economies with higher levels of social trust? Using firm-level data in 34 countries from 1990 through 2011, we find that liquidity-dependent firms in high-trust countries obtain more trade credit and suffer smaller drops in profits and employment during banking crises than similar firms in low-trust economies. The results are consistent with the view that when banking crises block the normal bank-lending channel, greater social trust facilitates access to informal finance, cushioning the effects of these crises on corporate profits and employment.

We examine the value consequences of corporate social responsibility through the lens of institutional shareholders. We find a sharp asymmetry between corporate policies that mitigate the firm’s exposure to environmental risk and those that enhance its perceived environmental friendliness (“greenness”). Institutional investors shun stocks with high environmental risk exposure, which we show have lower valuations, as predicted by risk management theory. These findings suggest that corporate environmental policies that mitigate environmental risk exposure create shareholder value. In contrast, firms that increase greenness do not create shareholder value and are also shunned by institutional investors.

An analysis of 4,814 SEOs during 1986–1999 indicates that the average offering ofnew shares is priced at a discount of 3% from the closing price on the day before the issue. Discounts have risen steadily over time, sharply increasing the indirect costs of issuing seasoned equity. There is evidence of increased clustering of offer prices at integers, and of greater importance in the analyst coverage provided by underwriters. Adjusting for other factors, we find that issues with integer offer prices, and underwriters with highly regarded analysts, are increasingly associated with larger discounts. The rise in discounts is consistent with an increased ability of investment bankers to extract rents from issuing firms.

Legal rights of investors are recognized as an essential component of corporate governance. We assess the efficacy of these rights by examining board changes surrounding the filings of shareholder derivative lawsuits. We find that the incidence of derivative lawsuits is higher for firms with a greater likelihood of agency conflicts. We also find that derivative lawsuits are associated with significant improvements in the boards of directors. In particular, the proportion of outside representation on the board of directors increases. There is also some evidence that other board characteristics change favorably. These findings suggest that shareholder derivative lawsuits are not frivolous as is often claimed, but rather that they can serve as an effective corporate governance mechanism.

We propose an explanation for the “disappearing dividend” phenomenon: a decline in the information content of dividend announcements, which reduces the propensity of firms to use dividends as a costly signal. A reason for a decline in the information content of dividends is the rise in holdings by institutional investors that are more sophisticated and informed. Indeed, we find a decline in CAR at dividend change announcements since the mid–1970s. Across firms, CAR is a decreasing function of institutional holdings. Institutional investors exploit their superior information and buy before dividend increases. In addition, dividends are less likely to rise in firms with high institutional holdings.

Recent research finds that the stocks that mutual fund managers buy outperform the stocks that they sell (e.g., Chen, Jegadeesh, and Wermers (2000)). We study the nature of this stock-picking ability. We construct measures of trading skill based on how the stocks held and traded by fund managers perform at subsequent corporate earnings announcements. This approach increases the power to detect skilled trading and sheds light on its source. We find that the average fund’s recent buys significantly outperform its recent sells around the next earnings announcement, and that this accounts for a disproportionate fraction of the total abnormal returns to fund trades estimated in prior work. We find that mutual fund trades also forecast earnings surprises. We conclude that mutual fund managers are able to trade profitably in part because they are able to forecast earnings-related fundamentals.