This paper studies the efficacy of pension fund activism by examining all firms targeted by nine major funds from 1987 to 1993. I document a movement away from takeover-related proxy proposal targetings in the late 1980s to governance-related proxy proposal and nonproxy proposal targetings in the 1990s. For the vast majority of firms, there are no significant abnormal returns at the time of targeting. The subset of firms subject to nonproxy proposal targeting, however, experiences a significant positive wealth effect. There is no evidence of significant long-term improvement in either stock price or accounting measures of performance in the post-targeting period. Collectively, these results cast doubt on the effectiveness of pension fund activism as a substitute for an active market for corporate control.

We argue that in the after-market trading of an IPO, the underwriting syndicate, by standing ready to buy back shares at the offer price (“price stabilization”), compensates uninformed investors ex post for the adverse selection cost they face in bidding for IPOs. This dominates ex ante compensation by underpricing. The reason is that stabilization exploits ex post information about investor demand whereas underpricing must be based on ex ante information. However, liquidity and syndication costs constrain the use of stabilization which, in equilibrium, generates some underpricing as well. We develop a model that formalizes this intuition and generates several empirical implications.

If shareholders own diversified portfolios, and if companies impose externalities on one another, shareholders do not want value maximization to be corporate policy. Instead, shareholders want companies to maximize portfolio values. This occurs when firms internalize between-firm externalities. Any kind of externality, pecuniary or nonpecuniary, vertical or horizontal, suffices. What matters is simply that one company's actions affect another's value. Thus, besides the traditional benefit of risk reduction, portfolio diversification offers additional benefits to shareholders through helping internalize externalities. This paper documents the extent of diversification and cross-ownership of stocks among companies where these externalities are likely to be large and provides a capital market test of how merger offers vary with the extent of cross-ownership.

This paper reexamines how risk return relationships are affected by investor uncertainty about the exact parameters of the joint rate of return distribution. We attempt to clarify results relating to three central issues. First, we address the issue of diversification, focusing on an APT, factor model framework. Second, we discuss the observability of estimation risk and describe research experimental designs that should encompass the existence of estimation risk and reveal it in the data. Finally, we suggest exploiting contemporaneous return observations on high and low information securities to aid in the measurement of return parameters for low information securities.

The short-term rate of interest is fundamental to much of theoretical and empirical finance, yet no consensus has emerged on the dynamics of its volatility. We show that models which parameterize volatility only as a function of interest rate levels tend to over emphasize the sensitivity of volatility to levels and fail to model adequately the serial correlation in conditional variances. On the other hand, serial correlation based models like GARCH models fail to capture adequately the relationship between interest rate levels and volatility. We introduce and test a new class of models for the dynamics of short-term interest rate volatility, which allows volatility to depend on both interest rate levels and information shocks. Two important conclusions emerge. First, the sensitivity of interest rate volatility to interest rate levels has been overstated in the literature. While this relationship is important, adequately modeling volatility as a function of unexpected information shocks is also important. Second, we conclude that the volatility processes in many existing theoretical models of interest rates are misspecified, and suggest new paths toward improving the theory.

Market prices of developing country debt reflect investors' views of country repayment capacity as well as other debt-specific factors. To extract a measure of repayment capacity from debt prices, adjustments need to be made to account for: debt values being a concave function of repayment capacity; the specific terms of the debt agreement; and the presence of third-party guarantees. This paper derives a measure of repayment capacity by constructing a pricing model that takes these factors into account. Applying the model to Brady bonds issued by Mexico, we find that estimated repayment capacity often performs differently from the unadjusted bond prices. We demonstrate that other Mexican bonds can be priced fairly accurately on the basis of this repayment capacity measure.

This paper examines trading volume on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Traditional theory suggests that taxes create strong incentives to delay realization of capital gains and accelerate realization of losses. Contrary to the theory, we find strong evidence that turnover is higher for stocks with gains (winners) than for stocks with losses (losers). In particular, the winner stocks of keiretsu firms tend to have high end-of-fiscal-year turnover. This is true even when realizing gains could result in higher tax liabilities. We conclude that capital gains taxes have only a small impact on turnover in Japan. Other non-tax-related motives, especially window dressing, appear to dominate investor behavior. We find strong evidence that this window dressing is concentrated in the stock of keiretsu firms.

This paper describes the application of the Principle of Maximum Entropy to the estimation of the distribution of an underlying asset from a set of option prices. The resulting distribution is least committal with respect to unknown or missing information and is, hence, the least prejudiced. The maximum entropy distribution is the only information about the asset that can be inferred from the price data alone. An extension to the Principle of Minimum Cross-Entropy allows the inclusion of prior knowledge of the asset distribution. We show that the maximum entropy distribution is able to accurately fit a known density, given simulated option prices at different strikes.