The paper argues that the market significantly overvalues firms with severely underfunded pension plans. These companies earn lower stock returns than firms with healthier pension plans for at least five years after the first emergence of the underfunding. The low returns are not explained by...

We introduce a new dynamic trading strategy based on the systematic mispricing of U.S. companies sponsoring Defined Benefit pension plans. This portfolio produces an average return of 1.51% monthly between 1989 and 2004, with a Sharpe Ratio of 0.26. The returns of the strategy are not explained...

As a consequence of the recent bear stock market, the aggregate funding level of defined benefit pension plans has tremendously deteriorated. A relevant issue is whether the market value of the firms sponsoring these plans reflects their pension liabilities. In sharp contrast with earlier...

We complement the conditional CAPM by introducing unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally 'learn' the long-level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a direct consequence of this assumption, conditional betas are...

Mandatory contributions to defined benefit pension plans provide a unique identification strategy to estimate the market's assessment of the value of internal resources controlling for investment opportunities. The price decrease following a pension-induced drop in cash is magnified for firms...

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from...

This paper examines the lack of information flow in the credit markets of developing countries. We show that the miscoordination among financial intermediaries might explain why lenders don't share their information about the borrowers. The competition effect of more transparency in the market...

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from...

We study a model where some investors (hedgers) are bad at information processing, while others (speculators) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of fi…nancial information induces a trade externality; if speculators refrain from trading,...

We study a model where some investors ("hedgers") are bad at information processing, while others ("speculators") have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading,...