Corporate Governance,Product Market Competition,and Equity Prices

This paper examines whether firms in noncompetitive industries benefit more from good governance than do firms in competitive industries. We find that weak governance firms have lower equity returns, worse operating performance, and lower firm value, but only in noncompetitive industries. When exploring the causes of the inefficiency, we find that weak governance firms have lower labor productivity and higher input costs, and make more value‐destroying acquisitions, but, again, only in noncompetitive industries. We also find that weak governance firms in noncompetitive industries are more likely to be targeted by activist hedge funds, suggesting that investors take actions to mitigate the inefficiency.     

Growth versus Margins: Destabilizing Consequences of Giving the Stock Market What It Wants

We develop a model in which a firm can devote effort either to increasing sales growth, or to improving per-unit profit margins. If the firm's manager cares about the current stock price, she will favor the growth strategy when the market pays more attention to growth numbers. Conversely, it can be rational for the market to weight growth measures more heavily when it is known that the firm is following a growth strategy. This two-way feedback between firms' strategies and the market's pricing rule can lead to excess volatility in real variables, even absent any external shocks.     

Higher Order Expectations in Asset Pricing

We examine formally Keynes' idea that higher order beliefs can drive a wedge between an asset price and its fundamental value based on expected future payoffs. We call this the higher order wedge, which depends on the difference between higher and first order expectations of future payoffs. We analyze the determinants of this wedge and its impact on the equilibrium price in the context of a dynamic noisy rational expectations model. We show that the wedge reduces asset price volatility and disconnects the price from the present value of future payoffs. The impact of the higher order wedge on the equilibrium price can be quantitatively large.     

Foreign Exchange Fixings and Returns around the Clock

The U.S. dollar appreciates in the run-up to foreign exchange (FX) fixes and depreciates thereafter, tracing a W-shaped return pattern around the clock. Return reversals for the top nine traded currencies over a 21-year period are pervasive and highly statistically significant, and they imply daily swings of more than one billion U.S. dollars based on spot volumes. Using natural experiments, we document the existence of a published reference rate determines the timing of intraday return reversals. We present evidence consistent with an inventory risk explanation whereby FX dealers intermediate unconditional demand for U.S. dollars at the fixes.     

Informed Lending and Security Design

We examine the role of security design when lenders make inefficient accept or reject decisions after screening projects. Lenders may be either “too conservative,” in which case they reject positive‐NPV projects, or “too aggressive,” in which case they accept negative‐NPV projects. In the first case, the uniquely optimal security is debt. In the second case, it is levered equity. In equilibrium, profitable projects that are relatively likely to break even are financed with debt, while less profitable projects are financed with equity. Highly profitable projects are financed by uninformed arm's‐length lenders.     

PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE ON INTERNAL MIGRATION,REMITTANCES, AND TEEN SCHOOLING IN INDIA

We examine correlations between the receipt of remittances from internal migrants and human capital investment in rural areas of India. We employ a propensity score matching approach to account for the selectivity of households into receiving remittances. We find a positive correlation between remittances received from internal migrants and the schooling attendance of teens. The magnitude of the correlation is greater when focusing on low‐caste households, and male schooling attendance in particular becomes more positive and statistically significant. Our findings provide a basis for establishing future research in the areas of migration and social protection in India. (JEL O15, J24, R23)     

Predicting Volatility in the Foreign Exchange Market

Measures of volatility implied in option prices are widely believed to be the best available volatility forecasts. In this article, we examine the information content and predictive power of implied standard deviations (ISDs) derived from Chicago Mercantile Exchange options on foreign currency futures. The article finds that statistical time-series models, even when given the advantage of “ex post” parameter estimates, are outperformed by ISDs. ISDs, however, also appear to be biased volatility forecasts. Using simulations to investigate the robustness of these results, the article finds that measurement errors and statistical problems can substantially distort inferences. Even accounting for these, however, ISDs appear to be too variable relative to future volatility.     

Exchange Rates and Monetary Policy Uncertainty

We document that a trading strategy that is short the U.S. dollar and long other currencies exhibits significantly larger excess returns on days with scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements. We show that these excess returns (i) are higher for currencies with higher interest rate differentials vis‐à‐vis the United States, (ii) increase with uncertainty about monetary policy, and (iii) increase further when the Federal Reserve adopts a policy of monetary easing. We interpret these excess returns as compensation for monetary policy uncertainty within a parsimonious model of constrained financiers who intermediate global demand for currencies.