Journal of Finance最新文献

Domestically listed Chinese (A-share) firms have lower stock returns than externally listed Chinese, developed, and emerging country firms during 2000 to 2018. They also have lower net cash flows than matched unlisted Chinese firms. The underperformance of both stock and accounting returns is more pronounced for large A-share firms, while small firms show no underperformance along either dimension. Investor sentiment explains low stock returns in the cross-country and within-A-share samples. Institutional deficiencies in listing and delisting processes and weak corporate governance in terms of shareholder value creation are consistent with the underperformance in stock returns and net cash flows.

Using novel data from the pharmaceutical industry, we study product prices and innovation around mergers. Exploiting within-deal variation in product market consolidation, we show that prices increase more for drugs in consolidating markets than for matched control drugs. Estimates indicate a 2% average price effect that persists for about one year. Price increases expand with acquirer-target product similarity and are more pronounced within less competitive product markets with fewer players and no generic competition. Examination of trade-offs reveals these deals generate significant shareholder value. They also spur labeling and other manufacturing-related innovation, but not the development of new drugs.

We train a machine learning method on a class of informed trades to develop a new measure of informed trading, informed trading intensity (ITI). ITI increases before earnings, mergers and acquisitions, and news announcements, and has implications for return reversal and asset pricing. ITI is effective because it captures nonlinearities and interactions between informed trading, volume, and volatility. This data-driven approach can shed light on the economics of informed trading, including impatient informed trading, commonality in informed trading, and models of informed trading. Overall, learning from informed trading data can generate an effective informed trading measure.

We propose a tractable model of dynamic investment, spinoffs, financing, and risk management for a multidivision firm facing costly external finance. Our analysis formalizes the following insights: (i) Within-firm resource allocation is based not only on divisions' productivity, as in winner-picking models, but also their risk; (ii) firms may voluntarily spin off productive divisions to increase liquidity; (iii) diversification can reduce firm value in low-liquidity states, as it increases the spinoff cost and hampers liquidity management; (iv) corporate socialism makes liquidity less valuable; and (v) division investment is determined by the ratio between marginal $�q$ and marginal value of cash.

We study how investment fees vary within private equity funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management- and performance-based fees. Managers of venture capital funds and those in high demand are less likely to use multiple fee schedules. Some investors consistently pay lower fees relative to others within their funds. Investor size, experience, and past performance explain some but not all of this effect, suggesting that unobserved traits like negotiation skill or bargaining power materially impact the fees that investors pay to access private markets.

Market-wide circuit breakers are trading halts aimed at stabilizing the market during dramatic price declines. Using an intertemporal equilibrium model, we show that a circuit breaker significantly alters market dynamics and affects investor welfare. As the market approaches the circuit breaker, price volatility rises drastically, accelerating the chance of triggering the circuit breaker—the so-called “magnet effect,” returns exhibit increasing negative skewness, and trading activity spikes up. Our empirical analysis supports the model's predictions. Circuit breakers can affect overall welfare negatively or positively, depending on the relative significance of investors' trading motives for risk sharing versus irrational speculation.

The psychology literature documents that individuals derive current utility from their beliefs about future events. We show that, as a result, investors in financial markets choose to disagree about both private information and price information. When objective price informativeness is low, each investor dismisses the private signals of others and ignores price information. In contrast, when prices are sufficiently informative, heterogeneous interpretations arise endogenously: most investors ignore prices, while the rest condition on it. Our analysis demonstrates how observed deviations from rational expectations (e.g., dismissiveness, overconfidence) arise endogenously, interact with each other, and vary with economic conditions.

We use proprietary data on intraday transactions at a futures brokerage to analyze how implied leverage influences trading performance. Across all investors, leverage is negatively related to performance, due partly to increased trading costs and partly to forced liquidations resulting from margin calls. Defining skill out-of-sample, we find that relative performance differentials across unskilled and skilled investors persist. Unskilled investors' leverage amplifies losses from lottery preferences and the disposition effect. Leverage stimulates liquidity provision by skilled investors, and enhances returns. Although regulatory increases in required margins decrease skilled investors' returns, they enhance overall returns, and attenuate return volatility.

We study when preferences for competition are a positive economic trait among high earners and the extent to which this trait can explain the gender gap in income among a master's degree in business administration (MBAs). Consistent with the experimental evidence, preferences for competition are a positive economic trait only for individuals who are not overconfident. Preferences for competition correlate with income only at graduation when bonuses are guaranteed and not a function of performance. Overconfident competition-loving MBAs observe lower compensation and income growth, and experience greater exit from high-reward industries and more frequent job interruptions. Preferences for competition do not explain the gender pay gap among MBAs.