We provide a new rationale for pyramidal ownership in family business groups. A pyramid allows a family to access all retained earnings of a firm it already controls to set up a new firm, and to share the new firm's nondiverted payoff with shareholders of the original firm. Our model is...

We investigate the empirical implications of using various measures of payout yield rather than dividend yield for asset pricing models. We find statistically and economically significant predictability in the time series when payout (dividends plus repurchases) and net payout (dividends plus...

This article provides an analytical solution to the problem of an institution optimally managing the market risk of a given exposure by minimizing its Value-at-Risk using options. The optimal hedge consists of a position in a single option whose strike price is independent of the level of...

We provide a formal test of the liquidity preference hypothesis (LPH), that is, the monotonicity of ex ante term premiums, using nonparametric estimates that do not require a structural model for conditional expected returns. Although the point estimates of the term premiums are consistent with...

The authors investigate the cross-sectional relation between industry-sorted stock returns and expected inflation, and they find that this relation is linked to cyclical movements in industry output. Stock returns of noncyclical industries tend to covary positively with expected inflation, while...

This paper explores a model based on agents with heterogenous beliefs facing short sales restrictions, and its explanation for the rise, persistence, and eventual fall of Internet stock prices. First, we document substantial short sale restrictions for Internet stocks. Second, using data on...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms’ shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than regulations mandate and...</p>

We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes...

We examine whether irrational behavior among small (retail) investors drives post-IPO prices. We use prices from the grey market (the when-issued market that precedes European IPOs) to proxy for small investors' valuations. High grey market prices (indicating overoptimism) are a very good...