Efficiently Inefficient Markets for Assets and Asset Management

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more easily, more money is allocated to active management, fees are lower, and asset prices are more efficient. Informed managers outperform after fees, uninformed managers underperform, while the average manager's performance depends on the number of “noise allocators.” Small investors should remain uninformed, but large and sophisticated investors benefit from searching for informed active managers since their search cost is low relative to capital. Hence, managers with larger and more sophisticated investors are expected to outperform.     

Initial Public Offerings and Underwriter Reputation

This paper examined the returns earned by subscribing to initial public offerings of equity (IPOs). Rock (1986) suggests that IPO returns are required by uninformed investors as compensation for the risk of trading against superior information. We show that IPOs with more informed investor capital require higher returns. The marketing underwriter's reputation reveals the expected level of “informed” activity. Prestigious underwriters are associated with lower risk offerings. With less risk there is less incentive to acquire information and fewer informed investors. Consequently, prestigious underwriters are associated with IPOs that have lower returns.     

Government as borrower of first resort

Optimal government bond supply is examined under asymmetric information and safe asset scarcity. Corporations issue junk debt when demand for safe debt is high since uninformed investors then migrate to risky overheated debt markets. Uninformed demand stimulates informed speculation, driving debt prices toward fundamentals, encouraging pooling at high leverage. As borrower of first resort, government can issue bonds, siphoning off uninformed demand for risky corporate debt, reducing wasteful informed speculation. Government bonds eliminate pooling at high leverage or improve risk sharing in such equilibria. Optimal government bond supply is increasing in demand for safe assets and non-monotonic in marginal Q.     

The Contributions of Stewart Myers to the Theory and Practice of Corporate Finance*

In a 40‐plus year career notable for path‐breaking work on capital structure and innovations in capital budgeting and valuation, MIT finance professor Stewart Myers has had a remarkable influence on both the theory and practice of corporate finance. In this article, two of his former students, a colleague, and a co‐author offer a brief survey of Professor Myers's accomplishments, along with an assessment of their relevance for the current financial environment. These contributions are seen as falling into three main categories:

• ? Work on “debt overhang” and the financial “pecking order” that not only provided plausible explanations for much corporate financing behavior, but can also be used to shed light on recent developments, including the reluctance of highly leveraged U.S. financial institutions to raise equity and the recent “mandatory” infusions of capital by the U.S. Treasury.
• ? Contributions to capital budgeting that complement and reinforce his research on capital structure. By providing a simple and intuitive way to capture the tax benefits of debt when capital structure changes over time, his adjusted present value (or APV) approach has not only become the standard in LBO and venture capital firms, but accomplishes in practice what theorists like M&M had urged finance practitioners to do some 30 years earlier: separate the real operating profitability of a company or project from the “second‐order” effects of financing. And his real options valuation method, by recognizing the “option‐like” character of many corporate assets, has provided not only a new way of valuing “growth” assets, but a method and, indeed, a language for bringing together the disciplines of corporate strategy and finance.
• ? Starting with work on estimating fair rates of return for public utilities, he has gone on to develop a cost‐of‐capital and capital allocation framework for insurance companies, as well as a persuasive explanation for why the rate‐setting process for railroads in the U.S. and U.K. has created problems for those industries.

     

The Inter-Temporal Behavior of Informed and Uninformed Traders

The purpose of this study is to investigate the inter-temporal trading behavior of informed and uninformed investors. We estimate a variation of the market microstructure model developed in Easley, Keifer, O'Hara, and Paperman (1996) and document the day-of-the-week pattern in informed and uninformed trading, as well as the probability of an information event and the probability of bad news. Using bootstrapped distributions, we show that the probability of trading against informed investors follows a U-shape pattern from Monday to Friday. Cross-sectional regression results suggest that inter-temporal patterns between informed and uninformed traders can generate observed patterns in liquidity provision costs.     

Momentum,Reversal, and Uninformed Traders in Laboratory Markets

We report the results of three experiments based on the model of Hong and Stein (1999) . Consistent with the model, the results show that when informed traders do not observe prices, uninformed traders generate long‐term price reversals by engaging in momentum trade. However, when informed traders also observe prices, uninformed traders generate reversals by engaging in contrarian trading. The results suggest that a dominated information set is sufficient to account for the contrarian behavior observed among individual investors, and that uninformed traders may be responsible for long‐term price reversals but play little role in driving short‐term momentum.     

Determinants of intellectual capital disclosure in prospectuses of initial public offerings

Intellectual capital is recognised as the new economic era’s pivotal factor underlying value creation. Deficient and inconsistent intellectual capital reporting is escalating information asymmetry between informed and uninformed investors. This provides fertile ground for informed investors to extract higher abnormal returns and higher wealth transfers from uninformed investors, particularly during a firm’s initial public offering (IPO). This study investigates the association between intellectual capital disclosure levels in prospectuses of 444 IPOs listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange between 1997 and 2006, and three potential explanatory determinants: (1) ownership retention; (2) proprietary costs; and (3) corporate governance structure. Statistical analysis supports our conjecture of a positive association between intellectual capital disclosure and ownership retention. We also find, consistent with expectations, a negative influence of proprietary costs on the positive intellectual capital disclosure – ownership retention association. However, contrary to predictions, we do not find an IPO’s corporate governance structure significantly influences the negative interaction of proprietary costs on the ownership retention – proprietary cost association. Our findings have implications for various parties such as regulators who may impose unnecessary costs on issuers if they introduce mandatory disclosures whilst lacking an understanding of the factors influencing intellectual capital disclosures.     

Informational Feedback,Adverse Selection,and Optimal Disclosure Policy

Faceless trading in a secondary stock market not only redistributes wealth among investors but also generates information that feeds back to real decisions. Using this observation we re‐evaluate the “leveling‐the‐playing‐field” rationale for disclosure to secondary stock markets. By partially preempting traders' information advantage established from information acquisition, disclosure reduces private incentives to acquire information, resulting in two opposite effects on firm value. On one hand, this narrows the information gap between informed and uninformed traders and improves liquidity of firm shares. On the other hand, this reduces the informational feedback from the stock market to real decisions. This tradeoff determines the optimal disclosure policy. The model explains why firm value can be higher in an environment that simultaneously promotes disclosure and private information production and why growth firms are endogenously more opaque than value firms.     

Information and the Cost of Capital

We investigate the role of information in affecting a firm's cost of capital. We show that differences in the composition of information between public and private information affect the cost of capital, with investors demanding a higher return to hold stocks with greater private information. This higher return arises because informed investors are better able to shift their portfolio to incorporate new information, and uninformed investors are thus disadvantaged. In equilibrium, the quantity and quality of information affect asset prices. We show firms can influence their cost of capital by choosing features like accounting treatments, analyst coverage, and market microstructure.     

Beyond EVA

A former partner of Stern Stewart begins by noting that the recent acquisition of EVA Dimensions by the well‐known proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) may be signaling a resurgence of EVA as a widely followed corporate performance measure. In announcing the acquisition, ISS said that it's considering incorporating the measure into its recommendations and pay‐for‐performance model. While applauding this decision, the author also reflects on some of the shortcomings of EVA that ultimately prevented broader adoption of the measure after it was developed and popularized in the early 1990s. Chief among these obstacles to broader use is the measure's complexity, arising mainly from the array of adjustments to GAAP accounting. But even more important is EVA's potential for encouraging “short‐termism”—a potential the author attributes to EVA's front‐loading of the costs of owning assets, which causes EVA to be negative when assets are “new” and can discourage managers from investing in the business. These shortcomings led the author and his colleagues to design an improved economic profit‐based performance measure when founding Fortuna Advisors in 2009. The measure, which is called “residual cash earnings,” or RCE, is like EVA in charging managers for the use of capital; but unlike EVA, it adds back depreciation and so the capital charge is “flat” (since now based on gross, or undepreciated, assets). And according to the author's latest research, RCE does a better job than EVA of relating to changes in TSR in all of the 20 (non‐financial) industries studied during the period 1999 through 2018. The article closes by providing two other testaments to RCE's potential uses: (1) a demonstration that RCE does a far better job than EVA of explaining Amazon's remarkable share price appreciation over the last ten years; and (2) a brief case study of Varian Medical Systems that illustrates the benefits of designing and implementing a customized version of RCE as the centerpiece for business management. Perhaps the most visible change at Varian, after 18 months of using a measure the company calls “VVA” (for Varian Value Added), has been a sharp increase in the company's longer‐run investment (not to mention its share price) while holding management accountable for earning an adequate return on investors’ capital.     

Voluntary Disclosure with Informed Trading in the IPO Market

We examine voluntary disclosure and capital investment by an informed manager in an initial public offering (IPO) in the presence of informed and uninformed investors. We find that in equilibrium, disclosure is more forthcoming—and investment efficiency is lower—when a greater fraction of the investment community is already informed. Moreover, managers disclose more information when the likelihood of an information event is higher, more equity is issued, or the cost of information acquisition is lower. Investment efficiency and the expected level of underpricing are non‐monotonic in the likelihood that the manager is privately informed.     

公司信息透明度的市场效应——来自中国A股市场的经验证据

目前在中国市场,信息披露质量是较数量更为有效的衡量公司信息透明度的方面。基于信息披露质量,我们分别以深交所上市公司考评中不及格和优秀等级的公司、沪深违规信忠披露公司及其配对公司作为两组研究样本,同时全面考察公司的信息透明度对投资者交易行为的影响以及相应的市场效应。两组样本检验结果一致表明,低透明度和严重的信息不对称是某些知情者诈取广大不知情的中小投资者利益的温床,并扭曲了资本市场的原有功能;从2001年至2004年,尽管公司信息透明度对大量中小投资者的股票选择没有显著影响,但其的确也帮助了投资者对所选择的股票进行定价。健全法律制度、培育理性投资者与信息中介、提高公司信息透明度,是促进市场有效的根本。     

From Stock Selection to Portfolio Alpha Generation: The Role of Fundamental Analysis

In this roundtable sponsored by Columbia Business School's Center for Excellence in Accounting Research and Security Analysis, a group of successful investors discuss their approaches and methods. A common saying among financial economists is that stock prices are set not by the average investor, but “at the margin” by the most sophisticated and influential investors. The intent of this roundtable is to furnish a portrait of such “marginal” investors, one that turns out to be quite different from the quarterly earnings‐driven, momentum traders often depicted by the media and deplored by corporate executives. In response to the common charge of short termism leveled by corporate managers, most of the investors at the table claimed to take large, multi‐year positions in companies they believed to be well‐managed, but temporarily undervalued. Instead of being attracted to earnings momentum, and rather than simply capitalizing current earnings at industry‐wide multiples to arrive at price targets, the analysis of these investors begins with a “deep dive” into a company's financials, which is often reinforced by primary research—visits with management, customers, suppliers. The aim of such research is to identify, well before the broad market does, companies that promise to earn consistently high and sustainable returns on invested capital.     

Analysts' Roundtable on Integrating ESG into Investment Decision‐Making

In this third of the three discussions that took place at the SASB 2016 Symposium, practitioners of a broad range of investment approaches—active as well as passive in both equities and fixed‐income—explain how and why they use ESG information when evaluating companies and making their investment decisions. There was general agreement that successful ESG investing depends on integrating ESG factors with the methods and data of traditional “fundamental” financial statement analysis. And in support of this claim, a number of the panelists noted that some of the world's best “business value investors,” including Warren Buffett, have long incorporated environmental, social, and governance considerations into their investment decision‐making. In the analysis of such active fundamental investors, ESG concerns tend to show up as risk factors that can translate into higher costs of capital and lower values. And companies' effectiveness in managing such factors, as ref lected in high ESG scores and rankings, is viewed by many fundamental investors as an indicator of management “quality,” a reliable demonstration of the corporate commitment to investing in the company's future. Moreover, some fixed‐income investors are equally if not more concerned than equity investors about ESG exposures. ESG factors can have pronounced effects on performance by generating “tail risks” that can materialize in both going‐concern and default scenarios. And the rating agencies have long attempted to reflect some of these risks in their analysis, though with mixed success. What is relatively new, however, is the frequency with which fixed income investors are engaging companies on ESG topics. And even large institutional investors with heavily indexed portfolios have become more aggressive in engaging their portfolio companies on ESG issues. Although the traditional ESG filters used by such investors were designed mainly just to screen out tobacco, firearms, and other “sin” shares from equity portfolios, investors' interest in “tilting” their portfolios toward positive sustainability factors, in the form of lowcarbon and gender‐balanced ETFs and other kinds of “smart beta” portfolios, has gained considerable momentum.     

The Capital Structure of PE‐Funded Companies (and How New Debt Instruments and Investors Are Expanding Their Debt Capacity)

The capital structures and financial policies of companies controlled by private equity firms are notably different from those of public companies. The concentration of ownership and intense monitoring of leveraged buyouts by their largest investors (that is, the partners of the PE firms who sit on their boards), along with the contractual requirement of PE funds to return their capital within seven to ten years, have resulted in capital structures that are far more leveraged than those of their publicly traded counterparts, but also considerably more provisional and “opportunistic.” Whereas the average U.S. public company has long operated with roughly 30% debt and 70% equity, today's typical private‐equity sponsored company is initially capitalized with an “upside‐down” structure of 70% debt and just 30% equity, and then often charged with working down its debt as quickly as possible. Although banks supplied most of the debt for the first wave of LBOs in the 1980s, the remarkable growth of the private equity industry in the past 25 years has been supported by the parallel development of a new leveraged acquisition finance market. This financing innovation has led to a general movement away from a bankcentered funding base to one comprising a relatively new set of institutional investors, including business development corporations and hedge funds. Such investors have shown a strong appetite for new debt instruments and risks that banks have been unwilling or, thanks to increased capital requirements and other regulatory burdens, prohibited from taking on. Notable among these new instruments are second‐lien loans and uni‐tranche debt—instruments that, by shifting the allocation of claims on the debtor's cash flow and assets in ways consistent with the preferences of these new investors, have had the effect of increasing the debt capacity of their portfolio companies. And such increases in debt capacity have in turn enabled private equity funds—now sitting on near‐record amounts of capital from their limited partners—to bid higher prices and compete more effectively in today's intensely competitive M&A market, in which high target acquisition purchase prices are being fueled by a strong stock market and increased competition from corporate acquirers.     

REVISITING MARKET EFFICIENCY: THE STOCK MARKET AS A COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM

Well‐functioning financial markets are key to efficient resource allocation in a capitalist economy. While many managers express reservations about the accuracy of stock prices, most academics and practitioners agree that markets are efficient by some reasonable operational criterion. But if standard capital markets theory provides reasonably good predictions under “normal” circumstances, researchers have also discovered a number of “anomalies”—cases where the empirical data appear sharply at odds with the theory. Most notable are the occasional bursts of extreme stock price volatility (including the recent boom‐and‐bust cycle in the NASDAQ) and the limited success of the Capital Asset Pricing Model in accounting for the actual risk‐return behavior of stocks. This article addresses the question of how the market's efficiency arises. The central message is that managers can better understand markets as a complex adaptive system. Such systems start with a “heterogeneous” group of investors, whose interaction leads to “self‐organization” into groups with different investment styles. In contrast to market efficiency, where “marginal” investors are all assumed to be rational and well‐informed, the interaction of investors with different “decision rules” in a complex adaptive system creates a market that has properties and characteristics distinct from the individuals it comprises. For example, simulations of the behavior of complex adaptive systems suggest that, in most cases, the collective market will prove to be smarter than the average investor. But, on occasion, herding behavior by investors leads to “imbalances”—and, hence, to events like the crash of '87 and the recent plunge in the NASDAQ. In addition to its grounding in more realistic assumptions about the behavior of individual investors, the new model of complex adaptive systems offers predictions that are in some respects more consistent with empirical findings. Most important, the new model accommodates larger‐than‐normal stock price volatility (in statistician's terms, “fat‐tailed” distributions of prices) far more readily than standard efficient market theory. And to the extent that it does a better job of explaining volatility, this new model of investor behavior is likely to have implications for two key areas of corporate financial practice: risk management and investor relations. But even so, the new model leaves one of the main premises of modern finance theory largely intact–that the most reliable basis for valuing a company's stock is its discounted cash flow.     

资本市场开放与股权资本成本——基于沪港通、深港通的实证研究

本文基于沪港通和深港通研究资本市场开放对中国内地股权资本成本的影响。研究发现,受政策风险和市场环境等因素所限,沪港通在初始阶段并未对沪市公司的股权资本成本产生显著影响,但随着政策进一步完善、市场逐渐稳定和交易不断活跃,其对股权资本成本的降低效果于实施两年后开始显现;深港通建立在沪港通的制度基础和运行经验上,其在开通后显著降低了标的公司的股权资本成本。本文还进一步分析了资本市场开放影响股权资本成本的竞争渠道和信息渠道,发现深港通对股权资本成本的降低作用主要集中在投资者竞争程度较高,或是公开信息质量较高、信息不对称程度较低的股票样本。     

The relationship between the frequency of news release and the information asymmetry: The role of uninformed trading

This paper shows that the degree of information asymmetry is lower for firms with more frequent news releases. The relation holds for various measures of information asymmetry such as the probability of information-based trading (PIN), permanent price impact, and adverse selection component of bid-ask spread, even after adjusting for endogeneity between news release and information asymmetry. By decomposing the PIN into intensities of uninformed and informed trades, similarly to Brown and Hillegeist (2007), we find that intensity of uninformed trading increases much more than that of informed trading for firms with more frequent news releases. As a result, information asymmetry, as is measured by PIN, decreases for such firms due to the large increase in the intensity of uninformed trading. Our findings highlight not only the importance of news releases in leveling the playing field of investors but also the role of uninformed investors in reducing trading cost due to information asymmetry.     

资本市场开放与股权资本成本——基于沪港通、深港通的实证研究

本文基于沪港通和深港通研究资本市场开放对中国内地股权资本成本的影响。研究发现,受政策风险和市场环境等因素所限,沪港通在初始阶段并未对沪市公司的股权资本成本产生显著影响,但随着政策进一步完善、市场逐渐稳定和交易不断活跃,其对股权资本成本的降低效果于实施两年后开始显现;深港通建立在沪港通的制度基础和运行经验上,其在开通后显著降低了标的公司的股权资本成本。本文还进一步分析了资本市场开放影响股权资本成本的竞争渠道和信息渠道,发现深港通对股权资本成本的降低作用主要集中在投资者竞争程度较高,或是公开信息质量较高、信息不对称程度较低的股票样本。     

What Drives Stock Price Behavior Following Extreme One-Day Returns

We identify samples of losers and winners by selecting daily stock price returns in excess of 10% (sign ignored) and determine whether these samples over‐ or underreact. We then identify “informed” events, which correspond to announcements in the Wall Street Journal(WSJ), and “uninformed” events, which are not explained in the WSJ. For winners, there is overreaction in response to uninformed events but no overreaction on average in response to informed events. This finding suggests the degree of overreaction to new information depends on whether the cause of the extreme stock price change is publicly released.