We examine how local political corruption affects firm innovation in the United States. We find that firms located in highly corrupt areas are less innovative as measured by their patenting activities. The results are robust to the inclusion of a broad set of regional characteristics, instrumental variable analysis, matching analysis, difference-in-differences test, and alternative proxies for local corruption. Further analysis shows that reduced innovation incentives due to high extortion risk and decreased threat of competition could be the possible economic channels through which corruption affects innovation. Overall, our results indicate that local political corruption impedes corporate innovation in the United States.

We show how to conduct asymptotically valid tests of model comparison when the extent of model mispricing is gauged by the squared Sharpe ratio improvement measure. This is equivalent to ranking models on their maximum Sharpe ratios, effectively extending the Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken (1989) test to accommodate the comparison of nonnested models. Mimicking portfolios can be substituted for any nontraded model factors, and estimation error in the portfolio weights is taken into account in the statistical inference. A variant of the Fama and French (2018) 6-factor model, with a monthly updated version of the usual value spread, emerges as the dominant model.

Stock liquidity has improved over the recent 4 decades. This improvement was accompanied by a dramatic increase in trading activity. The net effect on the liquidity premium is ambiguous. We show that the characteristic liquidity premium of U.S. stocks has significantly declined over the past 4 decades. In recent years, characteristic liquidity is significantly priced only for the smallest common stocks. This decline stems from an improvement in liquidity and from a lower sensitivity of expected returns to liquidity. By contrast, systematic liquidity has not been trending down and is still significantly priced primarily among NASDAQ stocks.

Many studies have documented that daily realized volatility estimates based on intraday returns provide volatility forecasts that are superior to forecasts constructed from daily returns only. We investigate whether these forecasting improvements translate into economic value added. To do so, we develop a new class of affine discrete-time option valuation models that use daily returns as well as realized volatility. We derive convenient closed-form option valuation formulas, and we assess the option valuation properties using Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 return and option data. We find that realized volatility reduces the pricing errors of the benchmark model significantly across moneyness, maturity, and volatility levels.

Managerial aversion to reduce dividends is not only an assertion to be found in the financial literature (see, for example, [2], [4], [8], [9]), but is also the basis for the informational content of dividends hypothesis (see [8]). Furthermore, its existence, if known to investors, can explain dividend payments which involve tax and transaction related costs. Surprisingly, the empirical evidence on this assertion is less than satisfactory. This study examines the existing empirical evidence on this assertion and points out its limitations. A new test, that can refute the informational content associated with the reluctance to cut dividends, is then performed.

We compare chief executive officer (CEO) turnover in public and large private firms. Public firms have higher turnover rates and exhibit greater turnover–performance sensitivity (TPS) than private firms. When we control for pre-turnover performance, performance improvements are greater for private firms than for public firms. We investigate whether these differences are due to differences in quality of accounting information, the CEO candidate pool, CEO power, board structure, ownership structure, investor horizon, or certain unobservable differences between public and private firms. One factor contributing to public firms’ higher turnover rates and greater TPS appears to be investor myopia.

This paper proposes and conducts direct tests of the mixture of distributions model for stock prices. By exploiting the model's bivariate conditional normality of price changes and trading volume, these restrictions can be tested under very weak assumptions regarding the daily flow of information to the market. As a technical byproduct, important parameters governing the distribution of this unobservable information flow are estimated.

We hypothesize that corporate income taxes distort firms’ incentives to innovate by reducing their pledgeable income. Using a differences-in-differences methodology, we document that large corporate income tax cuts boost corporate innovation. We find a similar but opposite effect for tax increases. Most of the change in innovation occurs 2 or more years after the tax change, and there’s no effect before the tax change. Exploring the mechanisms, we show that tax cuts have a stronger impact on innovation for firms with weaker governance, greater financial constraints, fewer tangible assets, smaller patent stock, and a greater degree of tax avoidance.

This paper documents pervasive evidence of intra-industry reversals in monthlyreturns. Unlike the conventional reversal strategy based on stock returnsrelative to the market portfolio, we document intra-industry return reversalsthat are larger in magnitude, consistently present over time, and prevalentacross subgroups of stocks, including large and liquid stocks. These returnreversals are driven by order imbalances and noninformational shocks. Consistentwith reversals representing compensation for supplying liquidity, intra-industryreversals are stronger following aggregate market declines and volatile times,reflecting binding capital constraints and limited risk-bearing capacity ofliquidity providers.

A great deal of interest has been expressed by economists and policy-makers concerning the adequacy of the financing of small and, especially, new firms. This paper presents an empirical study of the adequacy of one particular source of funds—outside equity.

Based on intraday data for a large cross section of individual stocks and newly developed econometric procedures, we decompose the realized variation for each of the stocks into separate so-called realized up and down semi-variance measures, or “good” and “bad” volatilities, associated with positive and negative high-frequency price increments, respectively. Sorting the individual stocks into portfolios based on their normalized good minus bad volatilities results in economically large and highly statistically significant differences in the subsequent portfolio returns. These differences remain significant after controlling for other firm characteristics and explanatory variables previously associated with the cross section of expected stock returns.

This paper compares downside risk measures that incorporate higher return moments with traditional risk measures such as standard deviation in predicting hedge fund failure. When controlling for investment strategies, performance, fund age, size, lockup, high-water mark, and leverage, we find that funds with larger downside risk have a higher hazard rate. However, standard deviation loses the explanatory power once the other explanatory variables are included in the hazard model. Further, we find that liquidation does not necessarily mean failure in the hedge fund industry. By reexamining the attrition rate, we show that the real failure rate of 3.1% is lower than the attrition rate of 8.7% on an annual basis during the period of 1995–2004.

We provide a comprehensive examination of shareholder resolutions to rescind poison pills. We find that pill rescission proposals are more frequent the more negative the market reaction to the initial pill adoption and the lower the insider and unaffiliated block ownership. Votes for such a proposal increase when performance is poor and for more onerous poison pills. While we document a stock price decline associated with the proposal announcements, we find poison pills are more likely to be restructured or rescinded when there is a shareholder resolution. Moreover, pill revisions are associated with stockholder wealth increases. Collectively, our results suggest that pill rescission proposals are more frequent when the pill is more likely to harm shareholders and that managers respond to shareholder proposals.

Practitioners increasingly use the enterprise multiple (EM) as a valuation measure. EM is (equity value + debt + preferred stock – cash) / (EBITDA). We document that EM is a strong determinant of stock returns. Following Fama and French (1993) and Chen, Novy-Marx, and Zhang (2010), we create an EM factor that generates a return premium of 5.28% per year. We interpret EM as a proxy for the discount rate. Firms with low EM values appear to have higher discount rates and higher subsequent stock returns than firms with high EM values.

We develop measures of the management quality of firms and make use of a unique sample of hand-collected data to examine the relationship between the reputation and quality of a firm’s management and its financial and investment policies, a relationship that has so far received little attention in the literature. We hypothesize that better and more reputable managers are able to convey the intrinsic value of their firm more credibly to outsiders, thus reducing the information asymmetry facing their firm in the equity market. Given this, firms with better and more reputable managers will have more access to the equity market, so that we expect lower leverage ratios for these firms. In addition, they will have less need to signal using dividends, so that they will have lower dividend payout ratios. Further, since better managers are likely to select better projects (having a larger net present value (NPV) for any given scale) and to implement them more ably, higher management quality will also be associated with higher levels of investment. We present evidence consistent with the above hypotheses. Our direct tests of the relationship between management quality and asymmetric information also indicate that higher management quality leads to a reduction in the extent of information asymmetry facing a firm in the equity market.

We investigate the pricing of 4,989 equity IPOs with offer dates between 1981 and 2000. Approximately three-fourths of these IPOs have integer offer prices. Average initial returns for IPOs with integer offer prices are significantly higher (24.5%) than those priced on the fraction of the dollar (8.1%). This result is robust through time and after conditioning for other effects known to influence initial returns. We hypothesize that integer vs. fractional dollar IPOs are the result of negotiations between the issuing firm and underwriter. Under this negotiation hypothesis, the frequency of integer pricing should be an increasing function of the offer price and the degree of uncertainty surrounding the value of the firm. Empirical evidence, supportive of the negotiation hypothesis, is presented.

Wall Street abounds with folklore concerning aggregate stock price movements before and after Presidential elections. Some suggest that movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) portend the outcome of elections. Others attribute movements in the market, prior to and after the election, to the anticipated outcome of the election. In this paper we examine some of the folklore with respect to the effect of Presidential elections on aggregate stock price movements and the implication of these movements on market efficiency.

Executive pay disparity, as measured by chief executive officer (CEO) pay slice (CPS), is positively associated with the implied cost of equity, even after controlling for other determinants of the cost of equity. The difference in the cost of equity can explain 43% of the difference in the valuation effect attributable to CPS reported by Bebchuk, Cremers, and Peyer (2011). Further analysis shows that the positive association is stronger when agency problems of free cash flow are more severe and when CEO succession planning is more important. Our evidence suggests that a large CPS is associated with CEO entrenchment and high succession risk.

This paper reexamines long-horizon stock returns and finds that previous work overstates the evidence of mean reversion. The overstatement is largely due to the implicit weighting of ordinary least-squares tests, which place more weight on the Depression and World War II observations, which have both large error variances and stronger mean-reverting tendencies. Additionally, the reliance on asymptotic statistics and the improper focus on only the most negative estimates of mean reversion contribute to the overstatement. Using generalized least-squares randomization tests on the 1926 to 1987 period, the random walk cannot be rejected for value- or equally-weighted real returns at any of 10 return horizons or by joint tests over all 10 horizons simultaneously. Additionally, the random walk cannot be rejected for the extended 1871 to 1987 period.

In this paper we present a method for valuing American and European put and call options on debt securities. Although no exhange-traded options of this type currently exist in the United States, the Chicago Board Options Exchange plans to introduce option contracts on several government bonds, and the Chicago Board of Trade petitioned the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to allow the trading of options on the Ginny Mae futures contract. In addition to pricing put and call options, the model developed here can be applied to the valuation of other securities such as callable bonds and bank loan commitments.