The experience of the recent financial crisis has brought to the attention the role of short selling. Short selling has been identified as a factor that contributes to market informational efficiency. At the same time, however, short selling has been regarded as “dangerous” to the stability of the financial markets and has been banned in many countries. Interestingly, these two seemingly conflicting views are based on the same traditional wisdom that short selling affects only the way in which information is incorporated into market prices by making the market reaction either more effective or overly sensitive to existing information but does not affect the behavior of firm managers, who may shape, if not generate, information in the first place.
Posts Tagged ‘Market reaction’
Corporate executives pay considerable attention to secondary market prices and they have strong incentives to maintain or increase the level of their firms’ stock prices. The accounting literature has long recognized that managers can make strategic financial reporting or disclosure choices to influence stock prices. A large body of empirical research examines whether and how corporate disclosures affect stock prices. The literature, however, provides little directional evidence on whether the behavior of stock prices has a causal effect on managerial strategic disclosure decisions. The difficulty in establishing causality stems largely from the endogenous nature of stock prices. In the paper, Short Selling Pressure, Stock Price Behavior, and Management Forecast Precision: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, which is forthcoming in Journal of Accounting Research, we use a randomized experiment, the Regulation SHO pilot program, to examine the causal effect of stock price behavior on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices.
Studies showing that weather patterns in major financial centers influence stock index returns provide suggestive evidence that investor mood influences asset prices (Saunders, 1993; Hirshleifer and Shumway, 2003). Individuals may misattribute mood induced by weather as information when making assessments about objects that should be otherwise unrelated (Schwarz and Clore, 1983), leading to mood-congruent judgments. For example, sunnier days may induce good moods amongst investors, generating overly optimistic beliefs regarding their investments and congruently influencing their trading decisions. Despite strong evidence of the weather effect on stock index returns, establishing plausibility in mood-based explanations relies in part on distinguishing which group of investors drives the weather effect, and directly confirming mood effects in their judgments.
The recent Supreme Court decision in Halliburton brought renewed interest to price impact and event studies. Aside from identification and analysis of the news itself, the event study has three basis steps: (i) Estimate a statistical model (or “market model”) of how the stock price would be expected to change in absence of such news (“predicted price changes”), (ii) Calculate stock price changes in excess of the predicted price changes (“excess price change”), and (iii) Evaluate the statistical significance of the excess price change to distinguish material news from noise, or normal variations in stock prices.
An initial public offering (IPO) is a major event in the life of any firm. But what does an IPO imply for the industry’s future? In our paper, An IPO’s Impact on Rival Firms, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we take a structural approach that allows different industries to progress in different ways post IPO. If one is forced to make a sweeping generalization, then this paper finds an IPO augurs in an era of reduced profits and greater consumer mobility within an industry. Unlike a static model, a structural model’s parameters produce implications about magnitudes rather than just signs. This permits one to assess whether the estimates are economically “reasonable in a straightforward manner.”
During the recent financial crisis, there was a dramatic spike in “idiosyncratic volatility”—the volatility of individual firm share prices after adjustment for movements in the market as a whole. The average firm’s increase was a remarkable five-fold as measured by variance. This dramatic spike is not peculiar to the most recent crisis. Rather, it has occurred with each major downturn in the economy since the 1920s, as our paper shows for the first time. These spikes present a puzzle in terms of existing economic theory. They also have important implications for several areas of corporate and securities law where the capacity of securities prices to reflect available information is particularly important. Examples include the presumption of reliance, loss causation and materiality in fraud-on-the-market suits, materiality in insider trading cases, and the corporate law regulation of defenses undertaken by targets of hostile takeover attempts. The continuing centrality of these issues is underscored by this week’s decision in Halliburton Co v. Erica P. John Fund, where the Supreme Court ruled that a defendant can defeat a fraud-on-the-market case class certification by showing that the alleged misstatement had no impact on price.
Many financial markets have recently become subject to new regulations requiring transparency. In our recent NBER working paper, The Effects of Mandatory Transparency in Financial Market Design: Evidence from the Corporate Bond Market, we study how mandatory transparency affects trading in the corporate bond market. In July 2002, the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) program began requiring the public dissemination of post-trade price and volume information for corporate bonds. Dissemination took place in four phases over a three-and-a-half year period, with actively traded, investment grade bonds becoming transparent before thinly traded, high-yield bonds.
Corporate scandals have large negative effects on the value of the firms that are discovered having committed fraud (Karpoff, Lee, and Martin, 2008; Dyck, Morse, and Zingales, 2013). Besides inflicting direct losses to shareholders, corporate fraud may also have indirect effects on households’ willingness to participate in the stock market, which may generate even larger losses by increasing the cost of capital for other firms. Evidence of the externalities generated by corporate fraud, however, is quite limited.
In our paper, Does Stock Liquidity Affect Incentives to Monitor? Evidence from Corporate Takeovers, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we examine the role of liquidity as a monitoring incentive and its effect on firm value by analyzing the market reaction to takeover announcements. The empirical evidence is consistent with the view that there is a tradeoff between monitoring via institutional intervention and liquidity for takeovers of private targets, but not for takeovers of public targets. This finding may be explained by the increased role of the disciplining effect of the threat of exit in connection to actions that on average destroy shareholder value, such as takeovers of public targets (Admati and Pfleiderer 2009).
In our paper, Merger Negotiations with Stock Market Feedback, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, we investigate whether pre-bid target stock price runups increase bidder takeover costs—an issue of first-order importance for the efficiency of the takeover mechanism. We base our predictions on a simple model with rational market participants and synergistic takeovers. Takeover signals (rumors) received by the market cause market anticipation of deal synergies that drive stock price runups. The model delivers the equilibrium pricing relation between the runup and the subsequent offer price markup (the surprise effect of the bid announcement) that should exist in a sample of observed bids.