The Quarterly Journal of Finance

We investigate whether corporate board members with media expertise influence firms’ media coverage and media slant. We find that firms with a media professional on the board of directors receive more media coverage, and articles written about them include fewer negative words compared with articles on control firms. These findings highlight the importance of the composition of the board of directors as a determinant of information disclosure mechanism.

The paper proposes a new algorithm for the high-dimensional financial data — the Groupwise Interpretable Basis Selection (GIBS) algorithm, to estimate a new Adaptive Multi-Factor (AMF) asset pricing model, implied by the recently developed Generalized Arbitrage Pricing Theory, which relaxes the convention that the number of risk-factors is small. We first obtain an adaptive collection of basis assets and then simultaneously test which basis assets correspond to which securities, using high-dimensional methods. The AMF model, along with the GIBS algorithm, is shown to have a significantly better fitting and prediction power than the Fama–French 5-factor model.

This paper examines the relation between expected market volatility and open-end mutual funds’ liquidity preferences. Using a large panel of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds, I show that mutual fund managers hold more cash and tilt their holdings more heavily towards liquid stocks during periods when expected market volatility is high. Cross-sectional tests suggest that the dynamic preferences for liquidity are driven by concerns over investor withdrawals during volatile times. Furthermore, I find evidence that this type of dynamic behavior leads to higher fund returns.

We investigate the impact of inter-firm connections on alliances. We find that both professional connections and social connections, borne out of board interlocks, employment ties and educational ties, increase the likelihood of alliance formation. In addition, the market reacts more favorably to alliance announcements in the presence of such connections, and this positive valuation effect increases with the degree of information asymmetry between the partner firms. Our findings are consistent with inter-firm connections creating value because they facilitate the flow of information between partner firms, thereby reducing moral hazard concerns and the risk of ex-post opportunistic behavior.

This paper examines the impact of banks’ lending incentives on asset prices and bank cash holdings under liquidity risk. Banks make lending decisions based on the tradeoff between costs (fire sales of illiquid assets) and benefits (high returns from bank loans). This paper shows fire sales of assets can be an endogenous outcome, even if banks are endowed with enough cash to meet liquidity shocks. This paper also helps explain why banks have kept a large amount of cash without lending after government capital injections in the 2008 financial crisis. The model further provides policy implications for government intervention.