Is bank lending special?

Bank loans ; Financial institutions ; Commercial loans

Do Stock Price Bubbles Influence Corporate Investment?

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints drives a firm's stock price above its fundamental value. Managers optimally respond to the stock market bubble by issuing new equity. The bubble reduces the user-cost of capital and increase real investment. Using the variance of analysts' earnings forecasts as a proxy for the dispersion of investor beliefs, we find strong empirical support for the model's key prediction that increases in dispersion cause increases in new equity issuance, Tobin's Q, and real investment.

Investment, protection, ownership, and the cost of capital

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor protection. In equilibrium, the marginal cost of capital is a weighted average of terms reflecting both idiosyncratic and systematic risk, and weaker investor protection increases the weight on idiosyncratic risk. Using firm-level data from 38 countries, we estimate the predicted relationships among investor protection, inside ownership, and the marginal cost of capital. We discuss implications for the determinants of firm size, the relationship between Tobin's Q and ownership, and the effect of financial liberalizations.Investor protection, ownership, investment, cost of capital, agency costs

Recent revisions to corporate profits: what we know and when we knew it

Initial estimates in the National Income and Product Accounts significantly overstated U.S. corporate profits for the 1998-2000 period. Subsequent revisions reveal that the profitability of the nation's corporate sector in the late 1990s was substantially weaker than "real-time" data indicated. An unexpected surge in employee stock options exercised-and perhaps, in some sectors, firms' inflated statements of profit-may help explain the large downward revisions.Corporate profits ; Stock options ; Statistics ; Economic indicators

Commercial Paper, Corporate Finance, and the Business Cycle: A Microeconomic Perspective

Little is known about the characteristics of individual commercial paper issuers, or about the reasons for the countercyclical issuance of commercial paper in the aggregate. To address these issues we construct a new panel dataset linking Moody's data on commercial paper issues with Standard and Poor's Compustat. High credit quality is a requirement for entry into the commercial paper market, but long-term credit quality (bond rating) is not a sufficient statistic for short-term quality. These characteristics allow firms to issuenear-riskless short-term debt and supply a near-money asset to themarket, thereby reducing their interest costs by the amount of the" commercial paper liquidity premium. We find that low-credit-quality firms have higher stocks of inventories and financial assets. In contrast to the countercyclicality of aggregate commercial paper, we find that firm-level commercial paper is procyclical. Our data support three explanations for this apparent contradiction, all of which recognize that commercial paper issuers are atypical. First, firms of high credit quality can use commercial paper to finance inventory accumulation during downturns. Second, they also can use commercial paper to finance countercyclical increases in accounts receivable. This suggests that commercial paper issuers serve as intermediaries for other firms during downturns. Third, it may be that portfolio demand for commercial paper -- a highly liquid, safe asset -- increases during downturns.