We propose an explanation for the “disappearing dividend” phenomenon: a decline in the information content of dividend announcements, which reduces the propensity of firms to use dividends as a costly signal. A reason for a decline in the information content of dividends is the rise in holdings by institutional investors that are more sophisticated and informed. Indeed, we find a decline in CAR at dividend change announcements since the mid–1970s. Across firms, CAR is a decreasing function of institutional holdings. Institutional investors exploit their superior information and buy before dividend increases. In addition, dividends are less likely to rise in firms with high institutional holdings.

We analyze the price reaction to analysts' revisions by testing the Griffin and Tversky (1992) hypothesis that agents place emphasis on the strength of the signal (the dramatic nature of the event) and may de-emphasize the weight (the ability of the analyst making the recommendation). Two attributes, namely, years of experience and the reputation of the analysts' brokerage houses form proxies for analyst ability (or weight) that we validate by documenting that revisions by high ability analysts outperform those by low ability ones. We find evidence of return persistence following small (low strength) revisions by high ability analysts and the opposite return pattern following large (high strength) revisions of low ability analysts, consistent with the arguments of Griffin and Tversky (1992). Our study provides an empirical link between evidence on individual decision making and stock market returns, and also helps promote an understanding of the analyst industry as well as its interaction with the investing population.

Extant theoretical research posits that information asymmetry and agency issues affect the cost of external financing and hence impact the ability of firms to finance their growth opportunities. In contrast, the literature on disclosure policy posits that expanded and credible disclosure lowers the cost of external financing and improves a firm's ability to pursue potentially profitable projects. An empirical implication is that disclosure can help firms grow by relaxing external financing constraints, thereby allowing capital to flow to positive net present value projects. This paper empirically evaluates this prediction using firm-level data over an 11-year period. As anticipated by theory, we find a positive relation between firm disclosure policy and the externally financed growth rate, after controlling for other influences.

We build a structural two-factor model of default where the stock market index is one of the stochastic factors. We allow the firm to adjust its leverage ratio in response to changes in the business climate for which the past performance of the stock market index acts as a proxy. We assume that the firm's log-leverage ratio follows a mean-reverting process and that the past performance of the stock index negatively affects the firms target leverage ratio. We show that for most credit ratings our model may explain actual yield spreads better than other well-known structural credit risk models. Also, our model shows that the past performance of the stock index returns and the firm's assets beta have a significant impact on credit spreads. Hence, our model can explain why credit spreads may be different within the same credit rating groups and why spreads are lower during economic expansions and higher during recessions.

We study the dynamic relation between daily stock returns and daily innovations in optionderived implied volatilities. By simultaneously analyzing innovations in index- and firmlevel implied volatilities, we distinguish between innovations in systematic and idiosyncratic volatility in an effort to better understand the asymmetric volatility phenomenon. Our results indicate that the relation between stock returns and innovations in systematic volatility (idiosyncratic volatility) is substantially negative (near zero). These results suggest that asymmetric volatility is primarily attributed to systematic market-wide factors rather than aggregated firm-level effects. We also present evidence that supports our assumption that innovations in implied volatility are good proxies for innovations in expected stock volatility.

We test whether a bias exists in analyst recommendations for firms that file for bankruptcy during 1995–2001. We fail to find overoptimism in analyst recommendations, including those of affiliated analysts. Our multivariate analysis of the market reaction to changes in analyst recommendations indicates that prior affiliation exerts no impact on either returns or trading volume. We find that the market does not view recommendation upgrades by affiliated analysts as biased since there is no price reversal following these recommendation changes. Overall, our results suggest that recently passed legislation to reduce analysts' conflicts of interest might be an overreaction.

This study uses a large sample of firms to examine how human capital considerations affect the process of CEO succession. Costs and benefits of succession planning are affected by a firm's level of operational complexity and human capital requirements; firms that are more complex incur greater costs to transferring firm-specific knowledge and expertise to an outsider, and should be more likely to groom an internal candidate for the CEO position. Consistent with this, I find that a firm's propensity to groom an internal candidate for the CEO position is related to firm size, degree of diversification, and industry structure. My results also suggest that succession planning is associated with a higher probability of inside succession and voluntary succession and a lower probability of forced succession. I also provide evidence that horizon problems are mitigated to some extent by having a succession plan.

We study securities market models with fixed costs. We first characterize the absence of arbitrage opportunities and provide fair pricing rules. We then apply these results to extend some popular interest rate and option pricing models that present arbitrage opportunities in the absence of fixed costs. In particular, we prove that the quite striking result obtained by Dybvig, Ingersoll, and Ross (1996), which asserts that under the assumption of absence of arbitrage long zero-coupon rates can never fall, is no longer true in models with fixed costs, even arbitrarily small fixed costs. For instance, models in which the long-term rate follows a diffusion process are arbitrage-free in the presence of fixed costs (including arbitrarily small fixed costs). We also rationalize models with partially absorbing or reflecting barriers on the price processes. We propose a version of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) model which, consistent with Longstaff (1992), produces yield curves with realistic humps, but does not assume an absorbing barrier for the short-term rate. This is made possible by the presence of (even arbitrarily small) fixed costs.

This paper measures changes in mutual fund trading costs following two reductions in the tick size of U.S. equity markets: the switch from eighths to sixteenths and the subsequent switch to decimals. We estimate trading costs by comparing a mutual fund's daily returns to the daily returns of a synthetic benchmark portfolio that matches the fund's holdings but has zero trading costs by construction. We find that the average change in trading costs of actively managed funds was positive following both reductions in tick size with a larger and statistically significant increase following decimalization. In contrast, index fund trading costs were unaffected.

According to conventional wisdom, industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots. SUR tests on panels of monthly Group of Ten (G-10) log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0.5% to 15%. On average, in out-of-sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods. For monthly data, the range of expected USD-DEM appreciation rates exceeds 15% per year in the mean reversion model. Mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models: over the sample period, the G-10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long-run nominal rates.

This study provides further evidence of earnings management around security offerings. We find positive and significant discretionary current accruals coincident with offerings of reverse LBOs. Issuers in the most aggressive quartile of earnings management have a one-year aftermarket return that is between 15% and 25% less than the most conservative quartile. We also find a negative and significant relation between abnormal accruals and post-issue abnormal returns within the first year after the offering. The relation remains after controlling for book-to-market ratio, firm size, offering size, and involvement of buyout specialists or management. Although earnings management has been used to explain post-issue long-term underperformance of IPOs and SEOs, our study shows that earnings management can explain post-offering returns of reverse LBOs, even in the absence of post-offering underperformance.

We examine announcement period abnormal returns to acquirers of listed and unlisted targets in 17 Western European countries over the interval 1996–2001. Acquirers of listed targets earn an insignificant average abnormal return of –0.38%, while acquirers of unlisted targets earn a significant average abnormal return of 1.48%. This listing effect in acquirers' returns persists through time and across countries and remains after controlling for the method of payment for the target, the acquirer's size and Tobin's Q, pre-announcement leakage of information about the transaction, whether the acquisition created a blockholder in the acquirer's ownership structure, whether the acquisition was a cross-border deal, and other variables. The fundamental factors that give rise to this listing effect, which has also been documented in U.S. acquisitions, remain elusive.

This paper investigates whether some individuals are prone to behavioral biases in their 401(k) investments. Using demographic data and allocation information for over 73,000 employees, I examine two allocation biases and a participation bias. The findings suggest that higher salaried employees tend to make significantly better choices. Participants who earn $100, 000 hold 12. 7% less in company stock, are 3% less likely to follow the framing 1/n heuristic, and are 37.7% more likely to participate than those earning $46, 000. Women make better choices in two of the three cases and I find evidence of mental accounting.

Traditional finance theories typically treat leases and debt as substitutes. However, the empirical findings on the relation between leases and debt are mixed. This paper reinvestigates this relation. I present a model to incorporate different theories on the substitutability and complementarity between leases and debt, and I test the model implications empirically in a GMM framework that simultaneously controls for endogeneity problems and firms' fixed effects. The findings suggest that leases and debt are substitutes instead of complements. I also investigate the variation in the substitutability between leases and debt, and find that in those firms with more growth options or larger marginal tax rates, or in those firms paying no dividends, the substitutability is more pronounced, i.e., the cost of new debt increases to a larger degree with extra leases.

Contrary to Baker and Wurgler (2002), I find that the importance of historical average market-to-book ratios in leverage regressions is not due to past equity market timing. Although equity transactions may be timed to equity market conditions, they do not have significant long lasting effects on capital structure. Debt transactions exhibit timing patterns that are unlikely to induce a negative relation between market-to-book ratios and leverage. I also find that historical average market-to-book ratios have significant effects on current financing and investment decisions, implying that they contain information about growth opportunities not captured by current market-to-book ratios.

We find that firms that regularly access public debt (bond) markets are more likely to pay a dividend and subsequently follow a dividend smoothing policy than firms that rely exclusively on private (bank) debt. In particular, firms with bond ratings follow a traditional Lintner (1956) style dividend smoothing policy, where the influence of the prior dividend payment is very strong and the current dividend is relatively insensitive to current earnings. In contrast, firms without bond ratings flow through more of their earnings as dividends and display very little dividend smoothing behavior. In effect, they seem to follow a residual dividend policy.

Miller (1977) hypothesizes that dispersion of investor opinion in the presence of short-sale constraints leads to stock price overvaluation. However, previous empirical tests of Miller's hypothesis examine the valuation effects of only one of these two necessary conditions. We examine the valuation effects of the interaction between differences of opinion and shortsale constraints. We find robust evidence of significant overvaluation for stocks that are subject to both conditions simultaneously. Stocks are not systematically overvalued when either one of these two conditions is not met.