Overpayment, Financial Distress, and Investor Horizons

Firms that follow excessive payout policies (over-payers) have significantly higher financial distress risk and lower survival compared to under-payers, consistent with risk-shifting from shareholders to creditors in distressed firms. All else equal, the presence of institutional investors with long-term investment horizons in a firm is associated with overpayment. A transition analysis indicates the existence of a reciprocal relation between overpayment and financial distress, highlighting the feedback effects between overpayment and distress. In addition, over-payers endure smaller future sales and assets growth, and experience a significant future increase in the overall riskiness of their assets, compared to under-payers

The waiting period of initial public offerings

The length of time it takes an IPO firm to go public (called ‘waiting period’) reflects multiple layers of scrutiny from underwriters, auditors, venture capitalists, institutional investors, and regulators. Accordingly, we show that the waiting period is a good barometer of ex ante uncertainty about future cash flows and that it has predictive power after the firm goes public. We find that firms marked by short waiting periods experience lower underpricing and less uncertainty and superior stock/operating performance in the aftermarket. We also report that smaller firms are taking longer to go public after SOX Act, thus providing justification for the 2012 JOBS Act

Acquisitions and Technology Value Revision

Acquisition announcements coincide with upward value revisions for the target firms’ technology peers, which are not due to economic relations based on product market, supply chain, or geo-graphical location. Such a phenomenon is robust across sub-sample periods, not specific to merger or technology waves, and not related to product-market structure and the unique innovation features of certain technology-intensive industries. Firms experience more dramatic value revisions when they have deeper technology overlaps with their targets, are more dependent on technology, or when a transaction features higher premium or greater technology overlap between the acquirer and target. Our mechanism analysis provides evidence that is primarily consistent with the Acquisition-Probability Hypothesis whereby acquisition announcements elevate expected technology synergies and merger prospects for peers; and partially in line with the Enhanced-Investment Hypothesis that peers’ revaluations correlate with increased technology investments. We do not find any evidence in line with the Competition-Balance Hypothesis which attributes peers’ value revisions to the change in industrial competition intensity. Overall, our results demonstrate that acquisition announcements disseminate novel information about the value of technology that is of common interest among firms with close technologies

Dividend changes and stock price informativeness

We investigate how private information in stock prices impacts quarterly dividend changes. We find that the positive relationship between past returns and current dividend changes strengthens when returns convey more private information. This finding is robust to the use of several price informativeness measures and the inclusion of managerial private information and stock overvaluation measures. Managers seem to learn new information from stock prices that they use when deciding on their dividend policy. This study highlights private information in stock prices as an important determinant of dividend policy and contributes to the literature on the real effects of financial markets