The Effect of Lender Identity on a Borrowing Firm's Equity Return

Previous research demonstrates that a firm's common stock price tends to fall when it issues new public securities. By contrast, commercial bank loans elicit significantly positive borrower returns. This article investigates whether the lender's identity influences the market's reaction to a loan announcement. Although we find no significant difference between the market's response to bank and nonbank loans, we do find that lenders with a higher credit rating are associated with larger abnormal borrower returns. This evidence complements earlier findings that an auditor's or investment banker's perceived “quality” signals valuable information about firm value to uninformed market investors.     

The Estimation of Realizable Holding Gains

The present paper outlines rules for estimating realizable holding gains within a current cost framework. The foundation for the procedures lies with a theorem properly named for Edwards and Bell (1961). The theorem is stated and proved and then employed to derive the relevant quadrature rules. Estimates of the holding gains applicable to U.K. manufacturing industry are then made. The estimates are found to be highly sensitive to the quadrature rule used.     

The effect of labor strikes on security analysts' forecast superiority and on the association between risk-adjusted stock returns and unexpected earnings*

Abstract. This paper empirically examines whether labor strikes affect the forecasting and information content of quarterly earnings numbers. We address two issues regarding financial analyst forecast (FAF) superiority: whether FAF superiority increases when a strike occurs and if so, whether the increase in FAF superiority is sustained immediately after the strike ends. We also examine two issues regarding information content: whether strikes affect the coefficient mapping unexpected earnings into stock prices and whether strikes affect the variance of stock price changes. We suggest that strikes affect both the forecasting and information content of quarterly earnings numbers. Résumé. Cet article examine de façon empirique si les grèves des travailleurs influencent la prévision et le contenu informatif des résultats trimestriels. Nous abordons deux questions relatives à la supériorité des prévisions d'analystes financiers (PAF): à savoir si la supériorité des PAF s'accroît lorsqu'une grève se produit et, dans l'affirmative, si l'accroissement de cette supériorité se maintient immédiatement après la fin de la grève. Nous étudions également deux questions relatives au contenu informatif: à savoir si les grèves influencent le coefficient incorporant l'impact des bénéfices imprévus sur le cours des actions et si les grèves affectent la variance des fluctuations du cours des actions. Les grèves affecteraient donc à la fois la prévision et le contenu informatif des résultats trimestriels.     

Approximate Factor Structures: Interpretations and Implications for Empirical Tests

This paper provides some new insights about approximate factor structures, as defined by Chamberlain and Rothschild [2], and their implications for empirical tests. First, we show that any economy that satisfies an approximate factor structure can be transformed, in a manner that does not alter the characteristics of investor portfolios, into an economy that satisfies an exact factor structure, as defined by Ross [9]. Second, we show that principal components analysis represents just one of many methods of forming groups of well-diversified portfolios with no idiosyncratic risk in large samples. Correct factor loadings will be obtained by regressing security returns on any group of these portfolios. Our interpretations of the Chamberlain and Rothschild results also provide additional insights into the testability of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory. We show that securities cannot be repackaged to hide factors in the manner suggested by Shanken [10] without the variance of some of the repackaged securities approaching infinity in large economies.     

EFFECTS OF CHINESE CURRENCY REVALUATION ON WORLD FIBER MARKETS

A partial equilibrium model is used to analyze effects of Chinese currency revaluation on world fiber markets. Unique characteristics of this model include incorporation of a regional supply response of cotton, substitutability between cotton and manmade fibers, and linkage between raw fiber and textile sectors. Simulation results show renminbi revaluation is likely to increase China's fiber imports and lower domestic cotton prices. Internationally, the world cotton price, polyester price, and cotton trade are expected to increase. A scenario modeling currency devaluation in China is run to test the stability of the model and ascertain its accordance with economic theory . ( JEL F17, F42, F47, O2)     

Improving Overnight Loan Identification in Payments Systems

Information on the allocation and pricing of over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets is scarce. Furfine (1999) pioneered an algorithm that provides transaction‐level data on the OTC interbank lending market. The veracity of the data identified, however, is not well established. Using permutation methods, I estimate an upper bound on the daily false positive rate of this algorithm to be between 10% and 20%. I propose refinements that reduce the bound to 10% or lower with negligible power loss. The results suggest that the inferred prices and quantities of overnight loans provide viable estimates of interbank lending market activity for Canadian data.     

Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation,Cognitive Dissonance,and the Disposition Effect

We analyze brokerage data and an experiment to test a cognitive dissonance based theory of trading: investors avoid realizing losses because they dislike admitting that past purchases were mistakes, but delegation reverses this effect by allowing the investor to blame the manager instead. Using individual trading data, we show that the disposition effect—the propensity to realize past gains more than past losses—applies only to nondelegated assets like individual stocks; delegated assets, like mutual funds, exhibit a robust reverse‐disposition effect. In an experiment, we show that increasing investors' cognitive dissonance results in both a larger disposition effect in stocks and a larger reverse‐disposition effect in funds. Additionally, increasing the salience of delegation increases the reverse‐disposition effect in funds. Cognitive dissonance provides a unified explanation for apparently contradictory investor behavior across asset classes and has implications for personal investment decisions, mutual fund management, and intermediation.