Columbus' Egg: The Real Determinant of Capital Structure

This paper shows that managers fail to readjust their capital structure in response to external stock returns. Thus, the typical firm's capital structure is not caused by attempts to time the market, by attempts to minimize taxes or bankruptcy costs, or by any other attempts at firm-value maximization. Instead, capital structure is almost entirely determined by lagged stock returns (which, when applied to ancient equity values, predict current equity value and with it debt equity ratios). Consequently, one should conclude that capital structure is determined primarily by external stock market influences, and not by internal corporate optimizing decisions.

The Equity Premium Consensus Forecast Revisited

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal information structures in an optimal auction exhibit a number of properties: (i) information structures can be represented by monotone partitions, (ii) the cardinality of each partition is finite, (iii) the partitions are asymmetric across agents. These properties imply that the optimal selling strategy of a seller can be implemented by a sequence of exclusive take-it or leave-it offers.Equity premium

An Economic Approach to the Psychology of Change: Amnesia, Inertia, and Impulsiveness

This paper models how imperfect memory affects the optimal continuity of policies. We examine the choices of a player (individual or firm) who observes previous actions but cannot remember the rationale for these actions. In a stable environment, the player optimally responds to memory loss with excess inertia, defined as a higher probability of following old policies than would occur under full recall. In a volatile environment, the player can exhibit excess impulsiveness (i.e., be more prone to follow new information signals). The model provides a memory-loss explanation for some documented psychological biases, implies that inertia and organizational routines should be more important in stable environments than in volatile ones, and provides other empirical implications relating memory and environmental variables to the continuity of decisions.Memory, inertia, amnesia, behavioral economics

The Optimal Concentration of Creditors

There are situations in which dispersed creditors (e.g., public creditors) have more difficulties and higher costs when collecting their claims in financial distress than concentrated creditors (e.g., banks). Under this assumption, our model predicts that measures of debt concentration relate [a] positively to creditors' chosen aggregate debt collection expenditures; [b] positively to management's chosen expenditures to avoid paying; [c] positively to total net litigation costs/waste in financial distress; and [d] positively to accomplished claim recovery by creditors (to which we present some preliminary favorable empirical evidence). Under additional assumptions, measures of debt concentration relate [e] positively to intrinsic firm quality; [f] positively to creditor monitoring and negatively to managerial waste; [g] positively to optimal continuation/discontinuation choices; [h] negatively to issuing marketing expenses. In a signaling model, when concentration alone is not a sufficient signal, firms choose the ultimately concentrated debt (i.e., a house bank) and have to pay a high interest.

The Optimal Concentration of Creditors

There are situations in which dispersed creditors (e.g., public creditors) have more difficulties and higher costs when collecting their claims in financial distress than concentrated creditors (e.g., banks). Under this assumption, our model predicts that measures of debt concentration relate [a] positively to creditors' chosen aggregate debt collection expenditures; [b] positively to management's chosen expenditures to avoid paying; [c] positively to total net litigation costs/waste in financial distress; and [d] positively to accomplished claim recovery by creditors (to which we present some preliminary favorable empirical evidence). Under additional assumptions, measures of debt concentration relate [e] positively to intrinsic firm quality; [f] positively to creditor monitoring and negatively to managerial waste; [g] positively to optimal continuation/discontinuation choices; [h] negatively to issuing marketing expenses. In a signaling model, when concentration alone is not a sufficient signal, firms choose the ultimately concentrated debt (i.e., a house bank) and have to pay a high interest.Banking, Capital Structure

Investor Sentiment Measures

This paper compares investor sentiment measures based on consumer confidence surveys with measures extracted from the closed-end fund discount (CEFD). Our evidence suggests that these two kinds of sentiment measures do not correlate well with one another. For a short 2 - 4 year period in which we have direct investor sentiment survey data from UBS/Gallup, only the consumer confidence correlates well with investor sentiment. Further, only the consumer confidence based measure can robustly explain the small-firm return spread and the return spread between stocks held disproportionately by retail investors and those held by institutional investors. Surprisingly, there is even a hint that the consumer confidence measure can explain closed-end fund IPO activity, while the CEFD cannot. In sum, our evidence supports the view that sentiment plays a role in financial markets, but that the CEFD may be the wrong measure of sentiment.

Predicting the Equity Premium With Dividend Ratios

Our paper reexamines the forecasting regressions which predict annual aggregate stock market returns net of the risk-free rate with lagged aggregate dividend-yield ratios and dividend-price ratios. Prior to 1990, the conditional dividend yield could reliably outperform the historical equity premium mean in predicting future equity premia *in-sample*. But our paper shows that the dividend ratios could not outperform the prevailing unconditional mean *out-of-sample*, plus any residual power was directly related to only two years, 1974 and 1975. As of 2000, even this in-sample predictive ability has disappeared. Our paper also documents changes in the time-series processes of the dividends themselves and shows that an increasing persistence of dividend-price ratio is largely responsible for weak stock return predictability.

A Review of IPO Activity, Pricing, and Allocations

We review the theory and evidence on IPO activity: why firms go public, why they reward first-day investors with considerable underpricing, and how IPOs perform in the long run. Our perspective on the literature is three-fold: First, we believe that many IPO phenomena are not stationary. Second, we believe research into share allocation issues is the most promising area of research in IPOs at the moment. Third, we argue that asymmetric information is not the primary driver of many IPO phenomena. Instead, we believe future progress in the literature will come from non-rational and agency conflict explanations. We describe some promising such alternatives.

A Comprehensive Look at the Empirical Performance of Equity Premium Prediction

Given the historically high equity premium, is it now a good time to invest in the stock market? Economists have suggested a whole range of variables that investors could or should use to predict: dividend price ratios, dividend yields, earnings-price ratios, dividend payout ratios, net issuing ratios, book-market ratios, interest rates (in various guises), and consumption-based macroeconomic ratios (cay). The typical paper reports that the variable predicted well in an *in-sample* regression, implying forecasting ability. Our paper explores the *out-of-sample* performance of these variables, and finds that not a single one would have helped a real-world investor outpredicting the then-prevailing historical equity premium mean. Most would have outright hurt. Therefore, we find that, for all practical purposes, the equity premium has not been predictable, and any belief about whether the stock market is now too high or too low has to be based on theoretical prior, not on the empirically variables we have explored.

Financial Market Runs

Our paper offers a minimalist model of a run on a financial market. The prime ingredient is that each risk-neutral investor fears having to liquidate after a run, but before prices can recover back to fundamental values. During the urn, only the risk-averse market-making sector is willing to absorb shares. To avoid having to possibly liquidate shares at the marginal post-run price in which case the market-making sector will already hold a lot of share inventory and thus be more reluctant to absorb additional shares all investors may prefer selling their shares into the market today at the average run price, thereby causing the run itself. Consequently, stock prices are low and risk is allocated inefficiently. Liquidity runs and crises are not caused by liquidity shocks per se, but by the fear of future liquidity shocks.