Information Content of Insider Trading Around Corporate Announcements: The Case of Capital Expenditures

There is gathering evidence of insider trading around corporate announcements of dividends, capital expenditures, equity issues and repurchases, and other capital structure changes. Although signaling models have been used to explain the price reaction of these announcements, a usual assumption made in these models is that insiders cannot trade to gain from such announcements. An innovative feature of this paper is to model trading by corporate insiders (subject to disclosure regulation) as one of the signals. Detailed testable predictions are described for the interaction of corporate announcements and concurrent insider trading. In particular, such interaction is shown to depend crucially on whether the firm is a growth firm, a mature firm, or a declining firm. Empirical proxies for firm technology are developed based on measures of growth and Tobin's q ratio. In the underlying “efficient” signaling equilibrium, investment announcements and net insider trading convey private information of insiders to the market at least cost. The paper also addresses issues of deriving intertemporal announcement effects from the equilibrium (cross-sectional) pricing functional. Other announcement effects relate the intensity of the market response to insider trading, variance of firm cash flows, risk aversion of the insiders, and characteristics of firm technology (growth, mature, or declining).     

THE WORLD BANK'S RESPONSE TO THE DEVELOPING COUNTRY DEBT CRISIS

The World Bank has responded to what it has perceived as two debt crises. The first is the highly publicized crisis in the middle-income, heavily indebted countries–mainly those in Latin America. The second has affected a set of about 20 much poorer African countries. The World Bank's responses to the two crises have been dissimilar as well. In the case of the heavily indebted, middle-income countries, whose debt is mainly to private creditors, the World Bank first responded with its Special Program of Action, beginning in 1983. Under the October 1985 Baker Plan, the World Bank was to increase its gross disbursements to these countries by 50 percent–a goal it has nearly met. Unfortunately, other creditors have not met Baker Plan goals, and so investment and growth in debtor countries has stagnated. The World Bank cannot continue providing a disproportionate share of financing needs. The World Bank has responded to the problems of the poorest debtor countries through its Special Program of Action for debt-distressed countries in Africa, and has coordinated its own concessional International Development Agency–soft loan window–lending with aid from other official creditors and donors.     

Institutional Ownership and Changes in the S&P 500

Several recent articles have provided new evidence for the existence of price pressures by examining the price and volume effects associated with changes in the S&P 500. The present study extends this work by examining actual changes in institutional holdings following both additions to and deletions from the S&P 500. The results show that changes in institutional holdings in response to additions or deletions from the S&P 500 are positively correlated. In addition to providing further evidence for the existence of price pressure effects, the results also provide evidence of the very large institutional elasticities of demand for stock.     

Information Cascades: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Financial Market Professionals

Previous empirical studies of information cascades use either naturally occurring data or laboratory experiments. We combine attractive elements from each of these lines of research by observing market professionals from the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in a controlled environment. Analysis of over 1,500 individual decisions suggests that CBOT professionals behave differently from our student control group. For instance, professionals are better able to discern the quality of public signals and their decisions are not affected by the domain of earnings. These results have implications for market efficiency and are important in both a positive and normative sense.     

Capital Controls and the International Transmission of U.S. Money Shocks

We assess whether capital controls effectively insulate countries from U.S. monetary shocks, examining a large range of country experiences in a unified estimation framework. We estimate the effect of identified U.S. monetary shocks on the exchange rate and foreign country interest rates, and test whether countries with less open capital accounts exhibit systematically smaller responses. We find essentially no evidence of this. Other country factors such as the exchange rate regime or degree of dollarization explain more of the cross-country differences in responses. The significant differences in responses we do find are more pronounced at short horizons.     

The Relation Between Reporting Quality and Financing and Investment: Evidence from Changes in Financing Capacity

We use changes in the value of a firm's real estate assets as an exogenous change in a firm's financing capacity to examine (1) the relation between reporting quality and financing and investment conditional on this change, and (2) firms’ reporting quality responses to the change in financing capacity. We find that financing and investment by firms with higher reporting quality is less affected by changes in real estate values than are financing and investment by firms with lower reporting quality. Further, firms increase reporting quality in response to decreases in financing capacity. Our findings contribute to the literature on reporting quality and investment, and on the determinants of reporting quality choices.     

Interpreting Permanent Shocks to Output When Aggregate Demand May Not Be Neutral in the Long Run

This paper studies a popular statistical model of permanent and transitory shocks to output using a set of arguably more plausible structural assumptions. One way to structurally interpret the model is by assuming aggregate demand has no long‐run output effect. However, many economic theories are inconsistent with that assumption. Instead, we reinterpret the statistical model assuming a positive shock to aggregate supply lowers the price level and in the long run raises output while a positive shock to aggregate demand raises the price level. Under these assumptions, a puzzling finding from the empirical literature implies that a positive aggregate demand shock had a long‐run positive effect on output in pre–World War I economies.     

Liquidity and Information Flow around Monetary Policy Announcement

We analyze the effects of monetary policy announcements on stock market liquidity using intraday data. We show that the impairment in liquidity associated with policy announcements occurs primarily after, rather than before, the announcements, and is relatively short lived, lasting about 1.5 hours. Liquidity impairment varies proportionately with the information content of the policy announcement, with larger effects associated with unscheduled announcements and scheduled announcements with larger policy surprises. Overall, our results suggest that informed traders have an information processing advantage over uninformed participants rather than access to private information.