Corporate Finance

Frederic Mishkin comments on Takatoshi Ito's chapter "Great Inflation and Central Bank Independence in Japan," expressing doubt that the Bank of Japan achieved de facto independence in 1975. Rather, he sees the bank as continuously subordinated to government pressure throughout the period. What differed at the end of the 1970s was that the government favored tightening. He also posits that the Japanese experience demonstrates that if the central bank has credibility for low inflation that oil price shocks need not be inflationary.

This paper studies the "confidential holdings" of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Funds managing large, risky portfolios with nonconventional strategies seek confidentiality more frequently. Stocks in these holdings are disproportionately associated with information-sensitive events or share characteristics indicating greater information asymmetry.

This paper studies the "confidential holdings" of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Funds managing large risky portfolios with nonconventional strategies seek confidentiality more frequently. Stocks in these holdings are disproportionately associated with information-sensitive events or share characteristics indicating greater information asymmetry.

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the efficiency of prepayment penalties in a dynamic competitive lending model with risky borrowers and costly default. When considering improvements in the borrower's creditworthiness as one of the reasons for refinancing mortgages, we show that refinancing penalties can be welfare improving, and that they can be particularly beneficial to riskier borrowers in the form of lower mortgage rates, reduced defaults, and increased availability of credit.

The SEC is currently considering a rulemaking petition requesting that the Commission shorten the ten-day window, established by Section 13(d) of the Williams Act, within which investors must publicly disclose purchases of a 5% or greater stake in public companies. In this Article, we provide the first systematic empirical evidence on these disclosures and find that several of the petition's factual premises are not consistent with the evidence.

We study a dynamic-contracting problem involving risk sharing between two parties — the Proposer and the Responder — who invest in a risky asset until an exogenous but random termination time. In any time period they must invest all their wealth in the risky asset, but they can share the underlying investment and termination risk. When the project ends they consume their final accumulated wealth. The Proposer and the Responder have constant relative risk aversion R and r respectively, with R > r > 0.

This paper explores the links between firms' voluntary disclosures and their cost of capital. Existing studies investigate the relation between mandatory disclosures and cost of capital, and find no cross-sectional effect but a negative association in time-series. In this paper, I find that when disclosure is voluntary firms that disclose their information have a lower cost of capital than firms that do not disclose, but the association between voluntary disclosure and cost of capital for disclosing and non-disclosing firms is positive in aggregate.

We develop a liability driven investment framework that incorporates downside risk penalties for not meeting liabilities. The shortfall between the asset and liabilities can be valued as an option which swaps the value of the endogenously determined optimal portfolio for the value of the liabilities. The optimal portfolio selection exhibits endogenous risk aversion and as the funding ratio deviates from the fully funded case in both directions, effective risk aversion decreases.