Fabulous investments
Corporate Scandals and Household Stock Market Participation
Mariassunta Giannetti & Tracy Yue Wang
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that after the revelation of corporate fraud in a state, household stock market participation in that state decreases. Households decrease holdings in fraudulent as well as non fraudulent firms, even if they do not hold stocks in fraudulent firms. Within a state, households with more lifetime experience of corporate fraud hold less equity. Following the exogenous increase in fraud revelation due to Arthur Andersen's demise, states with more Arthur Andersen clients experience a larger decrease in stock market participation. We provide evidence that the documented effect is likely to reflect a loss of trust in the stock market.
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Frenemies: How Do Financial Firms Vote on Their Own Kind?
Aneel Keswani, David Stolin & Anh Tran
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The financial sector is unique in being largely self-governed: the majority of financial firms' shares are held by other financial institutions. This raises the possibility that the monitoring of financial firms is especially undermined by conflicts of interest as a result of personal and professional links between these firms and their shareholders. To investigate this possibility, we scrutinize the aspect of the financial sector's self-governance that is directly observable: mutual fund companies' voting on their peers' stocks. We find that considerations specific to investee firms' membership in the same industry as their investors do indeed impact voting. This impact is in the direction of supporting the investee's management. We show that the own-industry effect reduces director efficacy and lowers firm value as a result. We extend our analysis to other financial companies and show that they also tend to vote more favorably when it comes to their peers. Our results suggest that peer support is a corrupting factor in the financial sector's governance.
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The Leverage Externalities of Credit Default Swaps
Jay Li & Dragon Yongjun Tang
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper provides the first empirical evidence of the externalities of credit default swaps (CDS). We find that a firm's leverage is lower when a larger proportion of its revenue is derived from CDS-referenced customers. This finding is robust to alternative samples and measures, placebo tests, and the selection of customers by suppliers. Moreover, firms affected by customer CDS trading issue equity to lower leverage, and their equity issuance costs are lower. These findings are consistent with the view that CDS trading on customers improves the information environment for suppliers. Therefore, while many firms are not directly linked to CDS trading, CDS trading on their customers has spillover effects on these firms' financial policies.
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The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct
Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos & Amit Seru
NBER Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
We construct a novel database containing the universe of financial advisers in the United States from 2005 to 2015, representing approximately 10% of employment of the finance and insurance sector. Roughly 7% of advisers have misconduct records. Prior offenders are five times as likely to engage in new misconduct as the average financial adviser. Firms discipline misconduct: approximately half of financial advisers lose their job after misconduct. The labor market partially undoes firm-level discipline: of these advisers, 44% are reemployed in the financial services industry within a year. Reemployment is not costless. Following misconduct, advisers face longer unemployment spells, and move to less reputable firms, with a 10% reduction in compensation. Additionally, firms that hire these advisers also have higher rates of prior misconduct themselves. We find similar results for advisers of dissolved firms, in which all advisers are forced to find new employment independent of past misconduct or performance. Firms that persistently engage in misconduct coexist with firms that have clean records. We show that differences in consumer sophistication may be partially responsible for this phenomenon: misconduct is concentrated in firms with retail customers and in counties with low education, elderly populations, and high incomes. Our findings suggest that some firms "specialize" in misconduct and cater to unsophisticated consumers, while others use their reputation to attract sophisticated consumers.
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ABCs of Trading: Behavioral Biases affect Stock Turnover and Value
Jennifer Itzkowitz, Jesse Itzkowitz & Scott Rothbort
Review of Finance, March 2016, Pages 663-692
Abstract:
Psychological research suggests that individuals are satisficers. That is, when confronted with a large number of options, individuals often choose the first acceptable option, rather than the best possible option (Simon, 1957). Given the vast quantity of information available and the widespread convention of listing stocks in alphabetical order, we conjecture that investors are more likely to buy and sell stocks with early alphabet names. Consistent with this view, we find that early alphabet stocks are traded more frequently than later alphabet stocks and that alphabeticity also affects firm value. We also document how these effects have changed over time.
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Alphabetic Bias, Investor Recognition, and Trading Behavior
Heiko Jacobs & Alexander Hillert
Review of Finance, March 2016, Pages 693-723
Abstract:
Extensive research has revealed that alphabetical name ordering tends to provide an advantage to those positioned in the beginning of an alphabetical listing. This article is the first to explore the implications of this alphabetic bias in financial markets. We find that US stocks that appear near the top of an alphabetical listing have about 5-15% higher trading activity and liquidity than stocks that appear toward the bottom. The magnitude of these results is negatively related to firm visibility and investor sophistication. International evidence and fund flows further indicate that ordering effects can affect trading activity and liquidity.
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Influential Investors in online stock forums
Lucy Ackert et al.
International Review of Financial Analysis, May 2016, Pages 39-46
Abstract:
This paper uses data from an online stock forum to examine the behavior of influential investors, posters who are popular among forum members. Unlike prior research, we find that influential investors post messages based on information and target actively traded large firms. Their predictions are more likely to indicate subsequent returns, as compared to other investors. Influential investors exhibit a preference for local investments and, furthermore, their predictions for local firms are more likely to be correct, suggesting a true information advantage. Thus, these investors contribute to the overall functioning of the market by providing insight into targeted companies.
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IPO pricing as a function of your investment banks' past mistakes: The case of Facebook
Laurie Krigman & Wendy Jeffus
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
On May 18, 2012 Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO), raising over $16 billion making it one of the largest IPOs in history. To the surprise of many investors, there was no underpricing―the stock closed the first day of trading flat from its offer price. The Facebook IPO was described as not only disappointing but also detrimental to the broader market. We explore why one IPO should have such widespread consequences. We document that the IPO market was silent for 41 days following Facebook. When it re-opened 41 days later, the average level of underpricing increased from 11% pre-Facebook to 20% post-Facebook. The common blame was an overall increase in risk-aversion among investors. We offer an alternative explanation. We show that the entire increase in underpricing is concentrated in the IPOs of the Facebook lead underwriters. We find no statistical difference in underpricing pre and post-Facebook for non-Facebook underwriters. We argue that investment bank loyalty to their institutional investor client based propelled the Facebook underwriters to increase underpricing to compensate for the perceived losses on Facebook.
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The Social Value of Financial Expertise
Pablo Kurlat
NBER Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to estimate the ratio of social to private marginal value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders' average profits, the fraction of bad assets among traded assets and the elasticity of good assets traded with respect to capital inflows. For venture capital, the ratio is between 0.64 and 0.83 and for junk bond underwriting, it is between 0.09 and 0.26. In both cases this is less than one so at the margin financial expertise destroys surplus.
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Does rating analyst subjectivity affect corporate debt pricing?
Cesare Fracassi, Stefan Petry & Geoffrey Tate
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints. We find that masters of business administration (MBAs) provide higher quality ratings. However, optimism increases and accuracy decreases with tenure covering the firm. Our analysis demonstrates the role analysts play in shaping investor expectations and its effect on corporate debt markets.
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Invisible walls: Do psychological barriers really exist in stock index levels?
Sam Alan Woodhouse et al.
North American Journal of Economics and Finance, April 2016, Pages 267-278
Abstract:
We investigate whether the levels of a stock market index contain any evidence of a behavioural bias depending on the proximity of the index level to 'psychological barriers'. These are certain index levels (usually in multiples of 100) at which the market tends to stick before breaking out either up or down. Extant behavioural finance literature has attributed this to investors' subjective perception of 'something special' about certain index levels where in fact no rational economic basis exists for such a perception. We carry out an empirical analysis of the NASDAQ Composite index and find that barrier effects are indeed present in that stock index. We employ simulation analysis to validate of our obtained results.
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Soft Strategic Information and IPO Underpricing
James Brau, James Cicon & Grant McQueen
Journal of Behavioral Finance, Winter 2016, Pages 1-17
Abstract:
Using content analysis, we measure the impact of soft information, derived from words in initial public offering (IPO) registration documents, on IPO pricing efficiency. First, using 2,298 U.S. IPOs from 1996-2008, we find that an IPO document's strategic tone correlates positively with the stock's first-day return; more frequent usage of positive and/or less frequent usage of negative strategic words leads to more IPO underpricing. Second, we find that an IPO document's strategic tone is negatively correlated with the stock's long-run return. Together, these findings imply that investors initially misprice soft information in registration statements, which mispricing is eventually corrected. Additionally, we create new content-analysis libraries for strategic words and introduce a survey-based library creation method and word-weighting system.