The Quarterly Journal of Finance

This paper examines the impact of the recently passed Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on the behavior of market participants. Using the JOBS Act — which relaxed mandatory information disclosure requirements — as a natural experiment on firms’ choices of the mix of hard, accounting information and textual disclosures, we find that relative to a peer group of firms, initial public offering (IPO) firms reduce accounting disclosures and change textual disclosures. Because it allows a partial revelation of IPO quality, only textual disclosures affect underpricing. We also find that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changes its behavior post-JOBS Act in responding to draft registration statements. Specifically, the SEC’s comment letters to firms are more negative in tone, and more forceful in their recommendations, focusing on quantitative information. Finally, under the JOBS Act, investors place more emphasis on the information produced by the SEC when pricing the stock. Returns following public release of the letters vary by about 4% based on letter tone.

We report systematic, out-of-sample evidence on the benefits to an already well-diversified investor that may derive from further diversification into various hedge fund strategies. We investigate dynamic strategic asset allocation decisions that take into account investors’ preferences, realistic transaction costs, return predictability, and the parameter uncertainty that such predictability implies. Our results suggest that not all hedge fund strategies benefit a long-term investor who is already well-diversified across stocks, government and corporate bonds, and REITs. However, when parameter uncertainty is accounted for, the best performing models offer net positive economic gains to investors with low and moderate risk aversion. Most of the realized economic value fails to result from mean-variance-type enhancements in realized performance but comes instead from an improvement in realized higher-moment properties of optimal portfolios.

Using the 2016 SEC Tick Size Pilot Program, we study the effects of an increase in tick size on institutional trading, market making costs, profitability, and activities. We find that increasing the tick size deters institutional trading participation, as it results in unfavorable stock characteristics, such as greater price impact and depressed share prices. In particular, we show that the implementation of the pilot program creates a substitution effect, which causes mutual funds to migrate from pilot (wider-tick) stocks to control (narrower-tick) peers. Furthermore, we document that widening the tick size increases adverse selection and inventory costs and thus reduces market making profitability, leading to lower market-making activities. Further analysis shows that these adverse effects can be attributed to the trade-at rule that prevents price-matching in non-displaying trading centers, while the quote rule that mandates a minimum quote increment of five cents enriches market makers and promotes liquidity provision. Finally, we show that our results are more pronounced for tick-constrained stocks than for unconstrained ones. Overall, the evidence contradicts the SEC’s intent to use a larger tick size to incentivize market making in small-cap stocks and attract more investors to trade these stocks, and dispraises the “one-size-fits-all” approach undertaken by regulators.

In 2013, Glassdoor launched the Employees’ Choice Awards for the Top CEOs. Glassdoor’s awards are unique in that feedback from employees exclusively determines the winners. Given Glassdoor’s notoriety, claiming 64 million unique visitors and 11 million job listings monthly, being listed as a Top CEO certainly has reputational value — but does it translate to higher shareholder returns? We find that the overall Top CEO sample statistically outperforms a matched sample and the S&P 500 index on a raw and risk-adjusted basis with superior Tobin’s Q and annual returns one year after the announcement.

Issuing activity does not result in superior post-issue liquidity. New issues are just as liquid as their peer non-issuers. Even the kinds of new issues that are supposed to be more liquid than others (initial public offerings (IPOs) backed by venture capital, new issues with high-prestige underwriters, severely underpriced IPOs) have the same liquidity as other similar issuers. The paper thus refutes the existing liquidity-based explanations of the new issues puzzle. The paper also shows that the low-minus-high turnover factor seems to explain the new issues puzzle and related anomalies only because it picks up volatility risk.