The Quarterly Journal of Finance

We focus on firms that chronically underperform and evaluate ways that institutional investors can facilitate asset redeployment. Increases in institutional holdings are associated with subsequent acquisition and decreases are associated with subsequent failure. For surviving underperformers, holdings and changes are associated with improved performance, but long-run abnormal returns remain negative and Q remains low. This association between holdings and performance is not causal. Rather, it is explained by “flight to quality” combined with persistence of financial performance, including persistence of abnormal returns for underperformers. The evidence casts doubt on interpretations in previous findings of positive relationships between holdings and performance.

Existing studies document that cash holdings are more valuable for financially constrained firms than for financially unconstrained firms. We investigate whether the relation between financial constraints and the value of corporate cash holdings varies across firms with different engagement in research and development activity. Among firms with R&D investment, the marginal value of cash is significantly higher for financially constrained firms than unconstrained ones, whereas this difference is weak among firms without R&D investment. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of financial constraints and alternative methods to define R&D intensity. Our study extends the cash literature by showing that the value of cash holdings is affected by the status of financial constraints and the nature of investment jointly.

The initial public offering (IPO) filing volume is positively related to changes in market volatility, especially when market returns are at ‘normal’ levels. This is consistent with the view that filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gives would-be issuers an ‘option’ on market valuations. Creating this option is attractive not only when market valuations rise but also when volatility increases, and the effect of volatility is more pronounced when market returns are neither high nor low. We therefore identify a distinct type of ‘window of opportunity’ for firms attempting to go public, characterized not particularly by strong stock valuations but by increased volatility in valuations.

This paper provides empirical evidence that media coverage of CEOs, a channel of investor recognition, significantly increases firm value, measured by Tobin’s q. The result is robust to alternative econometric methods and checks of causality. Firms with the highest level of CEO media coverage and positive coverage outperform those with the lowest levels by 8% and 7% per year, respectively, in abnormal stock returns. Media coverage also impacts CEO rent extraction through compensation. Subsequent total pay rise is 4.1% above and beyond what CEOs obtain from the increase in firm value that arises due to media coverage.

In this paper, we address the issue of how macroeconomic conditions affect corporate bond volatility. We employ the GARCH-MIDAS multiplicative two-component model of volatility that distinguishes the short-term dynamics from the long-run component of volatility. Both the in-sample and out-of-sample analysis show that recognizing the existence of a stochastic low-frequency component captured by macroeconomic and financial indicators may improve the fit of the model to actual bond return data, relative to the constant long-run component embedded in a typical GARCH model.