Review of Finance - recent issues

Editorial Statistics

Pagano, M., Zechner, J. — 2008-08-01

Equity Portfolio Diversification

Goetzmann, W. N., Kumar, A. — 2008-08-01

This study shows that U.S. individual investors hold under-diversified portfolios, where the level of under-diversification is greater among younger, low-income, less-educated, and less-sophisticated investors. The level of under-diversification is also correlated with investment choices that are consistent with over-confidence, trend-following behavior, and local bias. Furthermore, investors who over-weight stocks with higher volatility and higher skewness are less diversified. In contrast, there is little evidence that portfolio size or transaction costs constrains diversification. Under-diversification is costly to most investors, but a small subset of investors under-diversify because of superior information.

Are Economists More Likely to Hold Stocks?

Christiansen, C., Joensen, J. S., Rangvid, J. — 2008-08-01

Using a large panel data set containing detailed information on educational attainments as well as financial and socioeconomic variables for individual investors, we show that economists are more likely to hold stocks than otherwise identical investors. First, we consider the change in stockholdings associated with (i) completing an economics education and (ii) an economist moving into the household. Second, we model stock market participation using a probit model with unobserved individual heterogeneity. Third, instrumental variables estimation allows us to identify the causal effect of an economics education on stock market participation. Throughout, we focus explicitly on the effect of a change in educational status on the likelihood of holding stocks.

Informed Traders as Liquidity Providers: Anonymity, Liquidity and Price Formation

Rindi, B. — 2008-08-01

The tendency to introduce anonymity into financial markets apparently runs counter to the theory supporting transparency. This paper studies the impact of pre-trade transparency on liquidity in a market where risk-averse traders accommodate the liquidity demand of noise traders. When some risk-averse investors become informed, an adverse selection problem ensues for the others, making them reluctant to supply liquidity. Hence the disclosure of traders' identities improves liquidity by mitigating adverse selection. However, informed investors are effective liquidity suppliers, as their adverse selection and inventory costs are minimized. With endogenous information acquisition, transparency reduces the number of informed investors, thus decreasing liquidity. The type of information that traders hold and the effectiveness of insider trading regulation are crucial to distinguish between equilibria.

Suppressed Negative Information and Future Underperformance

Scherbina, A. — 2008-08-01

I present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that negative information withheld by securities analysts is incorporated in stock prices with a significant delay. I estimate the extent of the withheld negative information based on the proportion of analysts who stop revising their annual earnings forecasts. This measure predicts negative earnings surprises and negative price reaction around earnings announcements. It could also be used to generate profitable trading strategies. I show that institutions tend to sell their stock holdings as my measure of unreported negative news increases, thus ameliorating the mispricing.

Priming the Risk Attitudes of Professionals in Financial Decision Making

Gilad, D., Kliger, D. — 2008-08-01

We explore the influence of priming on financial decisions by reinforcing subjects' risk-seeking behavior under uncertainty and comparing it to behavior in control groups. We focused on professionals: commercial banks' investment advisors and accountants in CPA firms. Results indicate that priming affects subjects' risk attitudes and investment decisions. Professionals' decisions were affected more than undergraduates', suggesting they employ a more intuitive and less analytic approach in making their decisions. Our work is related to field-data research documenting correlations between returns (investors' decisions) and situational factors, (i.e., weather) by suggesting controlled tests of professionals' behavior vis-a-vis the complexity inherent in field data.

Editorial Statistics

Pagano, M., Zechner, J. — 2008-05-17

Short-Run Pain, Long-Run Gain: Financial Liberalization and Stock Market Cycles

Kaminsky, G. L., Schmukler, S. L. — 2008-05-17

The views on financial liberalization are quite conflictive. Many argue that it triggers financial bubbles and crises. Others claim that financial liberalization allows markets to function properly and capital to move to its most profitable destination. The empirical evidence on these effects is not robust. This paper constructs a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization and shows that a key reason for the inconclusive evidence is that the effects of liberalization are time-varying. Financial liberalization is followed by large booms and busts only in the short run. In the long run institutions improve and financial markets tend to stabilize.

Cross-listing and Firm Growth

Khurana, I. K., Martin, X., Periera, R. — 2008-05-17

Extant research posits that cross-listing improves firms' access to lower cost external financing. But so far, there is scarce evidence that improved access to external funds through cross-listing contributes to higher firm growth. Documenting the relation between firm growth and cross-listing is critical because the presumption in prior research is that funds raised via cross-listing will be channeled towards potentially profitable projects. Using a sample of firms from thirty-seven countries that are cross-listed in the USA, we find a positive association between cross-listing and subsequent externally financed firm growth rates. However, we do not find that increases in externally financed firm growth after cross-listing vary systematically as a function of the home-country attributes of the cross-listed firms. Overall, our results provide new and direct evidence on the impact of cross-listing on the firm growth rates.

An Examination of Heterogeneous Beliefs with a Short-Sale Constraint in a Dynamic Economy

Gallmeyer, M., Hollifield, B. — 2008-05-17

We study the effects of a market-wide short-sale constraint in a dynamic economy with heterogeneous beliefs. Imposing the constraint reduces the stock price if the optimistic investors' intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) is less than one and increases the stock price if the optimist's IES is greater than one. In calibrated examples, the optimist's market price of risk falls and the interest rate rises when the constraint binds. Imposing the constraint leads to a higher stock volatility if the optimist's IES is less than one and a lower stock volatility if the IES is greater than one.

Understanding Common Factors in Domestic and International Bond Spreads

Martell, R. — 2008-05-17

I study the determinants of changes in credit spreads for U.S. dollar denominated domestic and foreign sovereign bonds using fundamentals specified by structural models to separate spreads into their credit and non-credit components. I find that the non-default portions of spreads have a component that is common for each type of debt. Further, using a vector autoregressive model, I find that domestic spreads are related to the lagged component of sovereign spreads. I also find that some proxies for liquidity are related to the common components, suggesting a liquidity-based explanation for the common component not identified by previous research.

What Caused the Bank Capital Build-up of the 1990s?

Flannery, M. J., Rangan, K. P. — 2008-05-17

Large U.S. banks dramatically increased their capitalization during the 1990s, to the highest levels in more than 50 years. We document this buildup of capital and evaluate several potential motivations. Our results support the hypothesis that regulatory innovations in the early 1990s weakened conjectural government guarantees and enhanced bank counterparties' incentives to monitor and price default risk. We find no evidence that a bank holding company's (BHC's) market capitalization increases with its asset volatility prior to 1994. Thereafter, the data display a strong cross-sectional relation between capitalization and asset risk.

Call for Papers * The 2008 UniCredit Conference on Banking and Finance: Beyond the Illusion of Risk Diffusion

2008-05-17

Editorial Statistics

Pagano, M., Zechner, J. — 2008-02-21

Special issue on corporate governance * Preface

Allen, F., Mayer, C., Pagano, M., Zechner, J. — 2008-02-21

One Share - One Vote: the Theory

Burkart, M., Lee, S. — 2008-02-21

The theoretical literature on security-voting structure can be organized around three questions: What impact do nonvoting shares have on takeover outcomes? How does disproportional voting power affect the incentives of blockholders? What are the repercussions of mandating one share - one vote for firms' financing and ownership choices? Overall, the costs and benefits of separating cash flow and votes reflect the fundamental governance trade off between disempowering blockholders and empowering managers. It is therefore an open question whether mandating one share - one vote would improve the quality of corporate governance, notably in systems that so far relied on active owners.

One Share-One Vote: The Empirical Evidence

Adams, R., Ferreira, D. — 2008-02-21

We survey the empirical literature on disproportional ownership, i.e. the use of mechanisms that separate voting rights from cash flow rights in corporations. Our focus is mostly on explicit mechanisms that allow some shareholders to acquire control with less than proportional economic interest in the firm (dual-class equity structures, stock pyramids, cross-ownership, etc.), but we also briefly discuss other mechanisms, such as takeover defenses and fiduciary voting. We provide a broad overview of different areas in this literature and highlight problems of interpretation that may arise because of empirical difficulties. We outline potentially promising areas for future research.

Board Structures Around the World: an Experimental Investigation

Gillette, A. B., Noe, T. H., Rebello, M. J. — 2008-02-21

We model and experimentally examine the board structure–performance relationship. We examine single-tiered boards, two-tiered boards, insider-controlled boards, and outsider-controlled boards. We find that even insider-controlled boards frequently adopt institutionally preferred rather than self-interested policies. Two-tiered boards adopt institutionally preferred policies more frequently but tend to destroy value by being too conservative, frequently rejecting good projects. Outsider-controlled single-tiered boards, both when they have multiple insiders and only a single insider, adopt institutionally preferred policies most frequently. In those board designs where the efficient Nash equilibrium produces strictly higher payoffs to all agents than the coalition-proof equilibria, agents tend to select the efficient Nash equilibria.

Executive pay and shareholder litigation

Peng, L., Roell, A. — 2008-02-21

The paper examines the impact of executive compensation on private securities litigation. We find that incentive pay in the form of options increases the probability of securities class action litigation, holding constant a wide range of firm characteristics. We further document that there is abnormal upward earnings manipulation during litigation class periods and that insiders exercise more options and sell more shares during class periods, but that this activity is largely driven by pre-existing option holdings of the managers. Our results suggest that option-based compensation may have the unintended side effect of giving executives an incentive to focus excessively on the short term share price.

Institutional Investors and Private Equity

Nielsen, K. M. — 2008-02-21

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutional investors are the main contributors to private equity funds. This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutional investors also invest directly in private equity. A major concern for such investments is the higher agency costs associated with private equity. We show that institutions invest in private firms with governance mechanisms that tend to reduce the expected agency costs and risk of minority expropriation. Good governance mechanisms further allow institutional investors to enjoy the benefits of syndication and thereby reduce idiosyncratic risk. In addition, we show that institutional investments tend to be followed by further improvements in corporate governance and tend to occur in high-growth firms within research and development intensive industries.

Czech Mate: Expropriation and Investor Protection in a Converging World

Desai, M. A., Moel, A. — 2008-02-21

This paper examines the expropriation of a foreign investor by a local partner and the subsequent resolution of the case through international arbitration in favor of the investor. Despite the investor's 99% interest in the joint venture, the local partner managed to divert the entire value of the underlying entity for his personal benefit. This clinical examination of an expropriation and its aftermath illustrates the interaction of property and contract rights in a global setting, how corporate control is shaped by geography, and how multinational firms may be advantaged by availing themselves of stronger investor protections than local firms.