We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91,000 investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings. We identify classes of momentum investors and contrarian investors. We use these classes to build up “behavioral factors” based on contrarian and momentum flows and we show that they are relevant for pricing. They perform well against a benchmark of loadings on latent factors extracted from returns.

A dynamic model of strategic trading with two asymmetrically informed traders is analyzed where one informed trader knows the information seen by both informed traders, and the other informed trader only knows his private information. While the first informed trader is better informed, the second informed trader can make inferences about this extra information; in fact, the second informed trader can make sharper inferences from the order flow than the market maker about the extra information. In this setting, competition among the informed traders has a very interesting form. The informed trader with the additional information trades less intensely on that information early on, and both informed traders trade very intensely on their common information. This makes it more difficult for the trader with less information to learn about the information he does not have. When there are only a few remaining trading periods and the information known to both traders has largely been revealed through their trading, then the trader with the additional information trades more intensely on the basis of his private information.

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms’ corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are associated with greater synergies, superior long-run operating performance, and fewer write-offs of goodwill. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that cultural similarity eases post-deal integration. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of merger success, provide new evidence on the impact of corporate culture, and offer a new approach to defining firms’ cultural similarity.

This paper studies the impact of market consolidation or fragmentation on its performance, examining four alternative models of exchange: a consolidated clearing house, fragmented clearing houses, a monopoly dealer market, and an interdealer market. The effects of the market mechanism on the expected quantity traded, the price variance faced by individual traders, the quality of market price signals, the expected gains from trade, and the exchange implementation costs are studied.

This paper presents a generalized version of the lattice approach to pricing options. It shows how the control variate technique can produce significant improvements in the efficiency of the approach. The control variate technique is illustrated using American puts on dividend and nondividend paying stocks.

This paper considers several related problems in the theory of optimal capital structure for corporations. It is divided into four sections, which may be briefly summarized as follows.

1. Modigliani and Miller (MM) proposed that under the assumption of perfect markets and in the absence of taxes on corporate income, the total market value of the firm is unaffected by leverage. They showed that the leverage irrelevance proposition holds for “non-growth” firms when all investors agree in their estimates of the expected amount and the risk of each firm's future earnings. In section I, we show that this conclusion is not affected by growth trends or heterogeneous investor expectations. However, our analysis uncovers several additional assumptions which must be made explicitly for MM's Proposition I to hold. These additional assumptions pertain to the effects of leverage on the firm's future financing needs and future investment decisions. The generalized state-preference framework used for this demonstration is retained for subsequent discussion.

Critics claim that theories of secured debt fail to explain the widespread use of collateral because they incorrectly predict when a loan will be secured. This paper provides the first rigorous statistical test of the transaction cost models of secured debt. Data from two samples of over 1,000 small business loans generally support the common set of predictions of these theories. The incidence of secured debt is positively related to probability of default, loan size, loan maturity, and marketability of assets. Changes in the legal and economic environment also alter firms' decisions regarding the pledging of collateral.

Recent empirical studies have found ex post common stock returns to be consistently positively skewed. The frequency of positive skewness in this study is found to be relatively stable over varying time periods from 1961 to 1980. However, the skewness of individual stocks and portfolios of stocks does not persist across different time periods. Positively-skewed equity portfolios in one period are not likely to be positively skewed in the next time period. Past positively-skewed returns do not predict future positively-skewed returns.

I develop an agency model where returns-chasing behavior by mutual fund investors causes beta not to be priced to the degree predicted by the standard CAPM. Mutual fund investors chase returns through time, precipitating unusually large aggregate cash inflows into mutual funds just after dramatic market runups. Mutual fund investors also chase returns cross-sectionally across funds so that the highest-performing funds capture the largest fraction of the aggregate inflows into the mutu al fund sector. The interaction of these two flow-performance relationships induces an asymmetry in payoffs to mutual funds where fund managers care most about outperforming peers during bull markets. Since high-beta stocks tend to outperform in up markets, active fund managers tilt their portfolios toward high-beta stocks, reducing the beta risk premium in equilibrium. To support the model's time-series flow-performance assumption, I show empirically that market returns have a large economic impact on subsequent aggregate mutual fund flows. In addition, data on mutual fund holdings suggest that the aggregate stock portfolio held by equity funds is overweighted in high-beta stocks relative to the overall market, though this does not include the cash held by mutual funds. Fama-MacBeth tests indicate that the equity premium falls only slightly as the relative size of mutual funds increases, and the relation is not statistically significant.

Consistent with Connolly's (1989), (1991) evidence, this study finds that sample size and/or error term adjustments render U.S. day-of-the-week effects statistically insignificant. In contrast, day-of-the-week effects in seven European countries and in Canada and Hong Kong are robust to individual sample size or error term adjustments, and day-of-the-week effects in five European countries survive the simultaneous imposition of both types of adjustments. In most countries where day-of-the-week effects are robust, however, the effects are statistically significant in not more than two weeks out of the month. These findings are inconsistent with explanations of the day-of-the-week effect based on institutional differences or on the arrival of new information. Thus, in the absence of other potential explanations already dismissed by Jaffe and Westerfield (1985), evidence in this study further complicates the international day-of-the-week effect puzzle.

Markowitz's [2] portfolio selection model was originally concerned with financial investments, but the model's implications for capital budgeting are now well recognized. Markowitz's basic idea is that the optimal portfolio for an investor is not simply any collection of good securities, but a balanced whole, providing the investor with the best combination of “return” and “risk.” Return and risk are to be measured by the expected value and variance of the probability distribution of portfolio return. Although financial writers have generally accepted Markowitz's measure of return, they have not been completely satisfied with his suggested measure of risk [1]. In fact, Markowitz himself had reservations about choosing variance as a measure of risk.1 Besides variance, he considered five other alternative measures of risk:

(1) The expected value of loss;

(2) The probability of loss;

(3) The expected absolute deviation;

(4) The maximum expected loss; and

(5) The semivariance.

In his 1976 Presidential Address to the American Finance Association, Merton Miller provided a compelling argument that there currently exists no viable theory of the optimal capital structure of an individual firm. This argument follows from the critique he presented of existing models of capital structure and from the theory he outlined of the optimal aggregate capital structure of the economy as a whole. That theory depends on the existence of different marginal tax rates for individuals and a tax-free security. Professor Miller pointed out that he was motivated to develop his hypothesis by the apparent inadequacy of a (if not the most) popular explanation for capital structure at both the micro and the aggregate level: the tradeoff between the tax advantages of debt and the cost to the firm's security holders of the bankruptcy process. He observed that neither the tax advantage of debt nor the costs of bankruptcy may be quite what they seem at first glance. When the corporate income tax and the differential taxation of regular income and capital gains are taken into account, then the tax advantage of debt is reduced. Moreover, the limited empirical evidence from actual bankruptcies suggests that the real costs to security holders of bankruptcy may be really rather low. And the recent discussion by Haugen and Senbet [6] suggests that most of the costs attributed to bankruptcy are really costs of liquidation of the firm's assets and not relevant to the capital structure decision.

This paper examines the role of local attitudes toward gambling on corporate innovative activity. Using a county’s Catholics-to-Protestants ratio as a proxy for local gambling preferences, we find that firms located in gambling-prone areas tend to undertake riskier projects, spend more on innovation, and experience greater innovative output. We contrast the local gambling effect with chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence, another behavioral effect reported to influence innovation. We find that local gambling preferences are a stronger determinant of innovative activity, with CEO overconfidence being more relevant to innovation in areas where gambling attitudes are strong.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the errors made by professional forecasters (analysts) in estimating earnings per share for a large number of firms over a number of years. We have demonstrated in a previous paper that consensus (average) estimates of earnings per share play a key role in share price determination. In this paper, we examine consensus estimates with respect to the following questions: (1) What is the size and pattern of analysts' errors? (2) What is the source of errors? (3) Are some firms more difficult to predict than others? (4) Is there an association between errors in forecasts and divergence of analysts' estimates?

We examine the incidence of operational losses among U.S. financial institutions using publicly reported loss data from 1980 to 2005. We show that most operational losses can be traced to a breakdown of internal control, and that firms suffering from these losses tend to be younger and more complex, and have higher credit risk, more antitakeover provisions, and chief executive officers (CEOs) with higher stock option holdings and bonuses relative to salary. These findings highlight the correlation between operational risk and credit risk, as well as the role of corporate governance and proper managerial incentives in mitigating operational risk.

This paper studies a new theory for pricing options in a large trader economy. This theory necessitates studying the impact that derivative security markets have on market manipulation. In an economy with a stock, money market account, and a derivative security, it is shown, by example, that the introduction of the derivative security generates market manipulation trading strategies that would otherwise not exist. A sufficient condition is provided on the price process such that no additional market manipulation trading strategies are introduced by a derivative security. Options are priced under this condition, where it is shown that the standard binomial option model still applies but with random volatilities.

We use nearly 500 shifts in statutory corporate and personal income tax rates as natural experiments to assess the effect of corporate and personal taxes on capital structure. We find both corporate and personal income taxes to be significant determinants of capital structure. Based on ex post observed summary statistics, across Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, taxes appear to be as important as other traditional variables in explaining capital structure choices. The results are stronger among corporate tax payers, dividend payers, and companies that are more likely to have an individual as the marginal investor.

From various empirical work, it is well known that the volatility of asset returns changes over time. This might be one of the reasons that implied volatilities differ for options that only differ in time to maturity. We construct models for the relation between short- and long-term implied volatilities based on three different assumptions of stock return volatility behavior, i.e., mean-reverting, GARCH, and EGARCH models. We test these relations on option price data and conclude that EGARCH gives the best description of asset prices and the term structure of options' implied volatilities.

Data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange identify the originator of each submitted order, and there are no designated dealers or specialists. We study marketable order imbalances, i.e., the net order flow resulting from trades that demand immediacy. We distinguish imbalances by trader type (individuals, domestic institutions, foreign institutions) and by the usual size of each trader's order. Day-to-day persistence in order imbalance is strongest for small foreign institutions and weakest for large individual traders. Such persistence emanates both from splitting orders over time and from herding, and there is little evidence that aggregate price pressures from such persistence last beyond a trading day, indicating that de facto market making is quite effective. We attempt to discern which types of traders are de facto liquidity providers, which are likely to be informed, and which trade for liquidity reasons. The evidence indicates that all trader classes are successful market makers, large domestic institutions conduct the most informed trades, and large individuals are noise or liquidity traders.

We model the pricing implications of screens adopted by socially responsible investors. The model reproduces the empirically observed abnormal return to sin stock and implies a premium for systematic investor boycott risk that affects targeted as well as nontargeted firms. The investor boycott premium is not displaced by litigation risk, measures of neglect effect, illiquidity, industry momentum, or concentration. The investor boycott risk factor is useful in explaining mean returns across industries, and its premium varies with the relative wealth of socially responsible investors and the business cycle.