Security analyst networks, performance and career outcomes

Authors' draft. Final version to be published in The Journal of Finance. Available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/Using a sample of 42,376 board directors and 10,508 security analysts we construct a social network, mapping the connections between analysts and directors, between directors, and between analysts. We use social capital theory and techniques developed in social network analysis to measure the analyst’s level of connectedness and investigate whether these connections provide any information advantage to the analyst. We find that better-connected (better-networked) analysts make more accurate, timely, and bold forecasts. Moreover, analysts with better network positions are less likely to lose their job, suggesting that these analysts are more valuable to their brokerage houses. We do not find evidence that analyst innate forecasting ability predicts an analyst’s future network position. In contrast, past forecast optimism has a positive association with building a better network of connections

Financing Capacity Investment Under Demand Uncertainty

This paper studies the interplay between the operational and financial facets of capacity investment. We consider the capacity choice problem of a firm with limited liquidity and whose access to external capital markets is hampered by moral hazard. The firm must therefore not only calibrate its capacity investment and the corresponding funding needs, but also optimize its sourcing of funds. Importantly, the set of available sources of funds is derived endogenously and includes standard financial claims (debt, equity, etc.). We find that when higher demand realizations are more indicative of high effort, debt financing is optimal for any given capacity level. In this case, the optimal capacity is never below the efficient capacity level but sometimes strictly above that level. Further, the optimal capacity level increases with the moral hazard problem's severity and decreases with the firm's internal funds. This runs counter to the newsvendor logic and to the common intuition that by raising the cost of external capital and hence the unit capacity cost, financial market frictions should lower the optimal capacity level. We trace the value of increasing capacity beyond the efficient level to a bonus effect and a demand elicitation effect. Both stem from the risk of unmet demand, which is characteristic of capacity decisions under uncertainty

Explaining co-movements between equity and CDS bid-ask spreads

In this paper I show that the co-movements between bid-ask spreads of equities and credit default swaps vary over time and increase over crisis periods. The co-movements are strongly related to systematic risk factors and to the theoretical debt-to-equity hedge ratio. I document that hedging and asymmetric information, besides higher funding costs and market volatility risk, are driving factors of the commonality and are significantly priced in CDS bid-ask spreads

Did Liquidity Providers Become Liquidity Seekers?

The misalignment between corporate bond and credit default swap (CDS) spreads (i.e., CDSbond basis) during the 2007-09 financial crisis is often attributed to corporate bond dealers shedding off their inventory, right when liquidity was scarce. This paper documents evidence against this widespread perception. In the months following Lehman's collapse, dealers, including proprietary trading desks in investment banks, provided liquidity in response to the large selling by clients. Corporate bond inventory of dealers rose sharply as a result. Although providing liquidity, limits to arbitrage, possibly in the form of limited capital, obstructed the convergence of the basis. We further show that the unwinding of precrisis 'basis trades' by hedge funds is the main driver of the large negative basis. Price drops following Lehman's collapse were concentrated among bonds with available CDS contracts and high activity in basis trades. Overall, our results indicate that hedge funds that serve as alternative liquidity providers at times, not dealers, caused the disruption in the credit market

Fire Sale Bank Recapitalizations

status: accepte