Large Blocks of Stock: Prevalence, Size, and Measurement

Large blocks of stock play an important role in many studies of corporate governance and finance. Despite this important role, there is no standardized data set for these blocks, and the best available data source, Compact Disclosure, has many mistakes and biases. In this paper, we document these mistakes and show how to fix them. The mistakes and bias tend to increase with the level of reported blockholdings: in firms where Compact Disclosure reports that aggregate blockholdings are greater than 50 percent, these aggregate holdings are incorrect more than half the time and average holdings for these incorrect firms are overstated by almost 30 percentage points. We also demonstrate that our fixes are economically and statistically significant in an analysis of the relationship between firm value and outside blockholders.

Shareholder Rights, Boards, and CEO Compensation

I analyze the role of executive compensation in corporate governance. As proxies for corporate governance, I use board size, board independence, CEO-chair duality, institutional ownership concentration, CEO tenure, and an index of shareholder rights. The results from a broad cross-section of large U.S. public firms are inconsistent with recent claims that entrenched managers design their own compensation contracts. The interactions of the corporate governance mechanisms with total pay-for-performance and excess compensation can be explained by governance substitution. If a firm has generally weaker governance, the compensation contract helps better align the interests of shareholders and the CEO.

Founder-CEOs, Investment Decisions, and Stock Market Performance

Eleven percent of the largest public U.S. firms are headed by the CEO who founded the firm. Founder-CEO firms differ systematically from successor-CEO firms. Founder-CEO firms invest more in R&D, have higher capital expenditures, and make more focused mergers and acquisitions. They have a higher firm valuation. More-over, an equal-weighted investment strategy that had invested in founder-CEO firms from 1993{2002 would have earned a benchmark-adjusted return of 8.3% annually. A value-weighted investment strategy would have earned an abnormal return of 10.7%. The excess return is robust; after controlling for a wide variety of firm characteristics, CEO characteristics, and industry affiliation, the abnormal return is still 4.4% annually.

ICO investors

We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product is developed. Large presale investors obtain tokens at a discount and flip part of their allocation shortly after the ICO. ICO contributors lack the protections traditionally afforded to investors in early-stage financing. Nevertheless, returns 9 months after the ICO are positive on average, driven mostly by an increase in the value of the Ethereum cryptocurrency

Co-movements of Index Options and Futures Quotes

We re-examine the co-movements of index options and futures quotes first studied in Bakshi, Cao, and Chen (2000). We show that the frequency of quote co-movements that are inconsistent with standard option pricing models is significantly higher around option trades. We examine empirically two explanations for these co-movements. First, we show that in simulations the stochastic volatility model can generate approximately the right frequency of inconsistent co-movements when its parameters are chosen to match observed option prices. But even allowing for different regimes in trade and no-trade periods the model generates virtually the same frequency of inconsistent co-movements. Second, we examine the quote co-movements in event-time around trades and show that they are consistent with either traders picking off stale option quotes or with traders submitting aggressive limit orders. Our evidence suggest that inconsistent co-movements reflect both departures from the univariate diffusion model and market microstructure frictions.

Do Funds Need Governance? Evidence from Variable Annuity-Mutual Fund Twins

We study the roles of traditional governance (boards, sponsors, etc.) and market governance (investors voting with their feet) in mutual funds and variable annuities. We find that market governance is less pronounced for variable annuity investors. Using a matched sample of variable annuity-mutual fund twins, we find that variable annuity investors are less sensitive to poor performance and high fees than mutual fund investors. Given the weaker role played by market governance, we then examine the role played by traditional governance in variable annuities. Variable annuity boards and sponsors add alternative investment options and replace advisors on behalf of their investors after poor performance and high fees. These traditional governance mechanisms are, however, less effective when conflicts of interest exist between variable annuity sponsors and fund advisors.

Large Shareholders and Corporate Policies

We develop an empirical framework that allows us to analyze the effects of heterogeneity across large shareholders, and we construct a new blockholder-firm panel data set in which we can track all unique blockholders among large U.S. public firms. We find statistically significant and economically important blockholder fixed effects in investment, financial, and executive compensation policies. This evidence suggests that blockholders vary in their beliefs, skills, or preferences. Different large shareholders have distinct investment and governance styles: they differ in their approaches to corporate investment and growth, their appetites for financial leverage, and their attitudes towards CEO pay. We also find blockholder fixed effects in firm performance measures, and differences in style are systematically related to firm performance differences. Our results are consistent with influence for activist, pension fund, corporate, individual, and private equity blockholders, but consistent with systematic selection for mutual funds. Finally, we analyze sources of the heterogeneity, and find that blockholders with a larger block size, board membership, direct management involvement as officers, or with a single decision maker are associated with larger effects on corporate policies and firm performance.

Market Frictions and Seemingly Anomalous Co-movements of Index Options and Index Futures Quotes

A call option price is always an increasing and convex function of the underlying asset price whenever the underlying asset price follows a diffusion whose volatility depends only on time and the concurrent asset price-a one-dimensional diffusion. We empirically examine how often the observed quote movements are anomalous in the sense that they imply a violation of either the monotonicity or the convexity property using a sample of quotes and trades of options and futures on the FTSE 100 stock index. We show that such anomalous co-movements are about four times more likely to occur within a minute of an option trade than at other times and are related to the traders' order submissions. We interpret our results as evidence that the seemingly anomalous quote co-movements are driven by market frictions and should not be taken as evidence against option pricing models in the one-dimensional diffusion family. We show that the seemingly anomalous quote co-movements are consistent with traders making rational order submission decisions.

Estimating the Effects of Large Shareholders Using a Geographic Instrument

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying an effect empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework which allows us to separate selection from treatment effects of large shareholders. Unlike other blockholders, individuals tend to hold blocks in public firms located close to where they reside. Using this empirical observation, we develop an instrument--the density of wealthy individuals near a firm's headquarters--for the presence of a large, non-managerial individual shareholder in a firm. These shareholders have a large impact on firms, controlling for selection effects. Consistent with theories of large shareholders as monitors, we find that they increase firm profitability, increase dividends, reduce corporate cash holdings, and reduce executive compensation. Consistent with the view that there exist conflicts between large and small owners in public firms, we uncover evidence of substitution toward less tax-efficient forms of distribution in firms with blocks. In addition, large shareholders reduce the liquidity of the firm's stock.