Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance

Malcolm  Baker; Joshua  Coval; Jeremy  Stein

Article | Journal of Financial Economics | May 2007

Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance

by Malcolm Baker, Joshua Coval and Jeremy Stein

Abstract

We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to greenfield investment financed with an SEO. With a merger, acquirer stock is placed in the hands of investors, who, because of inertia, do not resell it all on the open market. If there is downward-sloping demand for acquirer shares, this leads to less price pressure than an SEO, and cheaper equity financing as a result. We develop a simple model to illustrate this idea, and present supporting empirical evidence. Both individual and institutional investors tend to hang on to shares granted them in mergers, with this tendency being much stronger for individuals. Consistent with the model and with this cross-sectional pattern in inertia, acquirers targeting firms with high institutional ownership experience more negative announcement effects and greater announcement volume. Moreover, the results are strongest when the overlap in target and acquirer institutional ownership is low and when the demand curve for the acquirer's shares appears to be steep.

Keywords: Behavior; Investment; Policy; Corporate Finance;

Format: Print

33 pages

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Citation:

Baker, Malcolm, Joshua Coval, and Jeremy Stein. "Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance." Journal of Financial Economics 84, no. 2 (May 2007): 266–298.

This case describes the Dogs of the Dow investment strategy, value investing, and using dividend yields as a means to determine intrinsic value. It also describes exchange traded notes and a particular exchange traded note, known as the Dogs of the Dow, which tracks the performance of the 10 highest yielding stocks of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). The case provides share price data, dividend data, and financial statement data on the 30 DJIA companies to enable students to perform their own calculations.

Working Paper | 2018

Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests

Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro

The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a “score anomaly,” it can pass the second test as a “factor anomaly,” or it can pass both. We demonstrate the relevance of each to a mean-variance optimizing investor facing simple transaction costs that are constant across stocks. For a risk-neutral investor facing transaction costs, only score anomalies are relevant. For a risk-averse investor facing no transaction costs, only factor anomalies are relevant. In the more general case of risk aversion and transaction costs, both tests matter. In extensions, we derive modified versions of the basic tests that net out anomaly execution costs for situations where the investor faces capital constraints, a multi-period portfolio choice problem, or transaction costs that vary across stocks. Next, we measure the econometric power of the two tests. Time-series factor tests have uniformly lower power than equivalent cross-sectional score tests, with the gap increasing in the in-sample Sharpe ratio of the incumbent factor model. New factor anomalies are successively harder to detect. There is a lower natural limit on the number of anomalies, after which new factors can no longer be verified. Meanwhile, for an investor facing transaction costs, where score anomalies are also applicable, there is a higher natural limit on the number of anomalies that can be statistically validated as relevant.

Keywords: investment management; asset pricing; anomalies; portfolio construction; transaction costs; Investment; Management; Asset Pricing; Market Transactions; Cost;

Citation:

Baker, Malcolm, Patrick Luo, and Ryan Taliaferro. "Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests." Working Paper, July 2018. View Details

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We develop a model of monetary policy with two key features: (i) the central bank has some private information about its long-run target for the policy rate, and (ii) the central bank is averse to bond-market volatility. In this setting, discretionary monetary policy is gradualist: the central bank only adjusts the policy rate slowly in response to changes in its target. Such gradualism represents an attempt to not spook the bond market. However, this effort is partially undone in equilibrium, as long-term rates rationally react more to a given move in short rates when the central bank moves more gradually. The same desire to mitigate bond-market volatility can lead the central bank to lower short rates sharply when publicly observed term premiums rise. In both cases, there is a time-consistency problem, and society would be better off with a central banker who cares less about the bond market.

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Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance

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