What Moves Investment Growth?

We use accounting identities to decompose unexpected changes in investment growth into surprises to current cash‐flow growth and stock returns, and revisions of expectations about future cash‐flow growth and future discount rates. Using a vector autoregressive model we find that current cash‐flow surprises account for the largest element of the variance decomposition. Investment growth and current cash‐flow surprises are negatively correlated with news about future cash‐flow growth, which can be expected from persistent productivity shocks and decreasing returns to scale. We find little evidence of a discount rate channel for investment since return terms are small and have unintuitive signs.     

How Wise Are Crowds? Insights from Retail Orders and Stock Returns

We analyze the role of retail investors in stock pricing using a database uniquely suited for this purpose. The data allow us to address selection bias concerns and to separately examine aggressive (market) and passive (limit) orders. Both aggressive and passive net buying positively predict firms’ monthly stock returns with no evidence of return reversal. Only aggressive orders correctly predict firm news, including earnings surprises, suggesting they convey novel cash flow information. Only passive net buying follows negative returns, consistent with traders providing liquidity and benefiting from the reversal of transitory price movements. These actions contribute to market efficiency.     

Does the Momentum Strategy Work at the Industry Level? Evidence from the Chinese Stock Market

This article examines the effectiveness of momentum strategy at the industry level in the Chinese stock market. We find that the intermediate-horizon momentum effect is stronger in industries with higher competition. This effect is consistent with the hypothesis that information contained in firms from highly competitive industries is vague and hence leaves more space for behavioral biases, which leads to the momentum effect. Alternatively, the measure of the Herfindahl–Hirschman index potentially captures the size effect in explaining this phenomenon. Moreover, concentrated industries experience a pronounced lead-lag effect of big firms on small firms, which is a potential explanation for the contrarian strategy. We do find that the short-horizon contrarian effect is pronounced in highly concentrated industries.     

What Drives the Property Price-Trading Volume Correlation? Evidence from a Commercial Real Estate Market

The significant price-trading volume correlation found in the residential property market presents a challenge to the rational expectation hypothesis. Existing theories account for this fact with either capital market imperfection (down-payment effect or loss-aversion consideration) or imperfect information (search theoretic models). This paper employs data from a commercial real estate market, which face a different degree of severity of capital market constraint than the residential market, and thus provide an indirect but effective test for alternative theories. Policy implications are also discussed.     

What explains the lagged-investment effect?

The best predictor of current investment at the firm level is lagged investment. This lagged-investment effect is empirically more important than the cash-flow and Q effects combined. We show that the specification of investment adjustment costs proposed by Christiano et al. (2005) predicts the presence of a lagged-investment effect and that a generalized version of their model is consistent with the behavior of firm-level data from Compustat.     

What keeps human resource professionals awake at night?

The topic of employees taking responsibility for their own benefits planning can be exasperating to human resource professionals and employers. But make no mistake: The topic is a vital one for employees and employers alike. Based on the experiences of financial counselors who provide independent financial counseling to more than two million employees of large organizations, this article presents the top ten mistakes employees make and suggests how human resource professionals can help employees avoid those mistakes.     

Do Hedge Fund Managers Misreport Returns? Evidence from the Pooled Distribution

We find a significant discontinuity in the pooled distribution of monthly hedge fund returns: The number of small gains far exceeds the number of small losses. The discontinuity is present in live and defunct funds, and funds of all ages, suggesting that it is not caused by database biases. The discontinuity is absent in the 3 months culminating in an audit, suggesting it is not attributable to skillful loss avoidance. The discontinuity disappears when using bimonthly returns, indicating a reversal in fund performance following small gains. This result suggests that the discontinuity is caused at least in part by temporarily overstated returns.     

What price loyalty? A fresh look at loyalty programs in the credit card industry

There is controversy about the effects of loyalty programs in the customer relationship management literature. Although some managers and researchers believe that customer loyalty created through loyalty programs leads to higher firm profits, others have found evidence that loyalty programs do not have a positive effect on firm's profits. In this article, we present our findings regarding the effect of reward cards and affinity cards on customer profitability in the context of credit card industry. We find surprising evidence that customers who own either a reward card or an affinity card generate significantly less profit than those customers who do not have these cards. Equally puzzling is the fact that these customers also have lower average lifetime with the firm. This leads us to a puzzle as to why these practices are widely prevalent in the industry. We find that loyalty cards provide value to the issuers in terms of risk management. They serve as a mechanism to reduce the risk associated with more profitable customers by attracting less risky customers. Thus, through loyalty cards the financial institution is able to balance out the total risk of the portfolio of customers by acquiring customers, who although less profitable, are less risky.     

What is the Intrinsic Value of the Dow?

We model the time-series relation between price and intrinsic value as a cointegrated system, so that price and value are long-term convergent. In this framework, we compare the performance of alternative estimates of intrinsic value for the Dow 30 stocks. During 1963–1996, traditional market multiples (e.g., B/P, E/P, and D/P ratios) have little predictive power. However, a V/P ratio, where V is based on a residual income valuation model, has statistically reliable predictive power. Further analysis shows time-varying interest rates and analyst forecasts are important to the success of V. Alternative forecast horizons and risk premia are less important.     

What explains the investment growth anomaly?

We examine if an existing asset pricing model in an unconditional or conditional setting can explain the investment growth anomaly, as represented by higher returns on stocks of the firms with lower growth in capital expenditures. Our results indicate that the conditional Fama–French 3-factor model that allows factor loadings to be time-varying and further linked to firm-level characteristics and the business cycle can explain the anomaly.     

How Does the Change in Investor Sentiment over Time Affect Stock Returns?

We examine how the change in investor sentiment (IS) over time (the IS trend) affects stock returns. The turnover rates of trading shares, trading value, and transactions, three market measures of trading activity, have been demonstrated to meet the psychometric criteria for measuring the IS trend. The ratio of market price to book value and the short-selling turnover ratio are inappropriate proxies. The empirical results indicate that the influence of the IS trend on returns depends on the direction of the trend (optimistic or pessimistic) and stock characteristics of individual holdings and on arbitrage constraint. The effectiveness of arbitrage, sentiment-driven mispricing, and market intervention are discussed.     

What drives the disappearing dividends phenomenon?

We study the determinants of dividend payout policy and examine the role of liquidity, risk and catering in explaining the changes in propensity to pay. Our results indicate that risk plays a major role in firms’ dividend policy. The evidence substantiates from a large sample of firms representing 18 countries over the sample period from 1989 to 2011. For firms in the US, France, UK and Other European markets, liquidity is additionally an important determinant of dividend policy. We find that, although catering incentives persist only among firms in common law countries and not in civil law countries, after adjusting for risk there is little support for catering theory even among firms incorporated in common law countries. Our results indicate that catering incentives reflect the risk-reward relationship in the changing propensity to pay dividends.     

Are Territorial Rating Models Outdated in Residential Property Insurance Markets? Evidence From the Florida Property Insurance Market

The fundamental shift in rating methodology from historical loss costs to catastrophe modeling for windstorm coverage calls into question the accuracy of rates developed using rating territories. Using premiums and modeled average annual loss (AAL) estimates from Citizens Property Insurance Corporation (Citizens) in Florida, this article analyzes the use of distance to coast (DtC) as a rating variable in providing coverage for the windstorm peril in homeowners insurance. Catastrophe models used to generate AAL costs do not rely on the same application of the law of large numbers as using historical loss costs and thus allows for more granular pricing of the windstorm peril. The results show that DtC, a rating variable that is property specific, more closely aligns premiums and AALs than territorial rating, and allows more granular pricing of the windstorm peril. More granular risk based pricing provides better incentives for homeowners regarding location and mitigation choices and may help reduce aggregate exposure to windstorm damages in the long run.     

What Determines the Variability of Accounting Accruals?

The variability of accounting accruals provides a measure of the normal level of managers accounting discretion and has important implications for event studies of earnings management. We examine how this measure is related to the economic factors including both firm characteristics and attributes of the disclosure environment. We show that the variability of accruals is related to firm size, leverage, variability of cash flows, operating cycle, growth, and other factors. Significant industry differences and temporal patterns are also found.     

What Does the Corporate Bond Market Know?

Do related markets reflect new information simultaneously? For high‐yield bonds, a large abnormal price decline in a corporation's most liquid bond over a month is followed by an average abnormal stock price decline of ?1.42%. This effect is larger for stocks that have increased in value and for volatile stocks. It is also larger for bonds with high coupons and shorter maturities. These results support the view that high‐yield corporate bonds have an informational edge when news is negative and stock returns are noisy, and add to the growing literature on the substantial lags in price discovery between related markets.     

What are the consequences of board destaggering?

In this paper, we examine the consequences of the decision to destagger the election of directors using a sample of firms that switched from a staggered to a destaggered board structure from 2002 through 2010. We find that the likelihood of destaggering increases in shareholder activism, firm size, and poor prior accounting performance. Furthermore, we find that firms that destagger tend to have larger boards and a lower entrenchment index prior to destaggering. We then use our determinants model to identify a sample of control firms that maintained a staggered board structure. Employing a difference-in-differences research design, we find that, relative to our control firms, firms that destaggered experience declines in Tobin’s q and accounting performance, measured by ROA. In addition, the negative effect on Tobin’s q is most pronounced in firms with greater advisory needs, consistent with the notion that destaggering results in worse performance when the advisory role of boards is more important. Contrary to claims made by proponents of destaggered boards, we find no evidence that CEOs are less entrenched after destaggering. We also provide some evidence suggesting that investment in R&D falls in the post-destaggering period, consistent with the view that after destaggering board members have shortened incentive horizons. Taken together, our evidence is contrary to the earlier studies that claim that destaggered boards are generally optimal and value-increasing.     

What drives the performance of convertible-bond funds?

This paper examines the performance of US mutual funds that invest primarily in convertible bonds. Multivariate cross-sectional analyses show a significant relation between a fund’s performance and its asset composition: the higher the difference in the percentage of assets invested in convertible bonds compared to the percentage invested in stocks, the higher the performance, on average. We show that this result can be explained by factors associated with investment opportunities in the convertible-bond market and trading strategies related to convertible arbitrage, as typically performed by hedge funds. Overall, convertible-bond fund performance measured by alpha is comparable to a passive investment in stocks, bonds, and convertible bonds. This performance is the result of weak selection skills and successful timing strategies related to convertible arbitrage.     

How Does the Market for Corporate Control Function for Property Companies?

We investigate 95 takeovers of property companies all over the world and find that only two of those are hostile. To determine the effectiveness of the market for corporate control, we first study characteristics of targets and acquirers compared to a control sample, using the complete global universe of listed property companies during the most recent takeover wave (1999–2004). We find that the inefficient management hypothesis holds for both REITs and non-REITs, as targets exhibit significant underperformance before takeovers. In the second part of this study, we investigate shareholder wealth effects following takeovers and confirm previous findings that abnormal returns for targets and bidders are distinctly different for the real estate sector. Moreover, we show that this difference not only holds for REIT-to-REIT mergers, but also for mergers of real estate firms without a REIT-status.