Corporate Finance

We analyze strategic speculators' incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading on private information reveals this information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. While this feedback effect increases the profitability of buying on good news, it reduces the profitability of selling on bad news, and thus has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior.

We estimate a short term reversal process for daily US equity returns. Over our primary sample period of 1972-2014, and for our sample of the 100 largest traded firms, on average approximately 90% of idiosyncratic price shocks are permanent. The remaining 10% is temporary, and decays exponentially toward zero, with a half life of about 2.5 days. While the rate of decay (the half life) is relatively constant over time, the magnitude decay varies considerably over the sample. Our findings are consistent with the slow movement of capital (Duffie 2010).

We develop a structural model for the analysis of systemic risk in financial markets based on asset price contagion. Specifically, we describe a mechanism of contagion where exogenous random shocks to individual agents in an economy force portfolio rebalancing and endogenously impact asset prices. This, in turn, creates a chain reaction as downstream agents trade in reaction to price changes.

We develop a simple dynamic investment strategy that allows long‐term passive investors to hedge climate risk without sacrificing financial returns. Our proposed hedging strategy goes beyond a simple divestment of high carbon footprint or stranded assets stocks. This is just the first step. The second step is to optimize the composition of the low carbon portfolio so as to minimize the tracking error with the reference benchmark index. We show that tracking error can be almost eliminated even for a low carbon index that has 50% less carbon footprint.

As Gerakos and Linnainmaa (2014) point out, the Daniel and Titman (2006) decomposition of returns into tangible and intangible components can potentially be ambiguous. In particular DT's book return, the adjusted growth rate in book value per share which DT use as a tangible measure of long term performance, can be affected by a firm's issuance and repurchase choices as well as by its profitability.

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs by defaulting on their mortgages. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously delinquent borrowers with subprime mortgages throughout the country. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that Countrywide's relative delinquency rate increased more than ten percent per month immediately after the program's announcement.

We propose a new definition of skill as a general cognitive ability to either pick stocks or time the market at different times. We find evidence for stock picking in booms and for market timing in recessions. Moreover, the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in recessions. These fund managers significantly outperform other funds and passive benchmarks. Our results suggest a new measure of managerial ability that gives more weight to a fund's market timing in recessions and to a fund's stock picking in booms.

Recent years have seen extensive investigation of the information aggregation properties of markets. However, relatively little is known about conditions under which a market will aggregate the private information of rational risk averse traders who optimize their portfolios over time; in particular, what features of a market encourage traders to ultimately reveal their private information through trades? We consider a market model involving finitely many informed risk-averse traders interacting with a market maker.

Having invested multiple billion dollars of pension assets, and now teaching "Institutional Investing; Alternatives in Pension Plans," I approach this question with theoretical and empirical knowledge, and more than a modicum of trepidation.