The Quarterly Journal of Finance

We decompose the standard consumption beta into two components that measure consumption risk in high and low economic activity states. Recessionary consumption risk commands a positive and statistically significant compensation, while the market price of expansionary consumption risk is not robust. The two-beta model explains well the cross-section of excess returns on book-to-market-, size-, and momentum-sorted portfolios, and substantially outperforms the traditional one-beta model. The results hold through for various business cycle classifications and alternative consumption measures.

Corporate debt market is crucial to raise capital for businesses and to maintain steady economic growth. Disclosure with more complete accounting information provides more informative signals for investors to assess a firm’s risk of defaulting on its debt, which is the fundamental mechanism of the seminal theory by Duffie and Lando [2001, Term Structures of Credit Spreads with Incomplete Accounting Information, Econometrica 69(3), 633–664]. Using a disclosure quality measure that captures the completeness of accounting information in the income statement and balance sheet, we show that a firm’s default risk is significantly and negatively associated with the completeness of its accounting information. We further show that the negative relation is mainly driven by the information completeness of the balance sheet, relative to that of the income statement. In addition, the information completeness of the long-term liabilities on the balance sheet better explains a firm’s default risk, compared to the current liabilities. Overall, our findings provide new evidence on the importance of accounting information completeness for both firms and investors in the debt market.

This paper predicts the two most common stock market exits — mergers and drops — using logit models based on firm-level variables and analyzes the returns of stocks that have high exit probabilities. Such analysis is important for investors given that frequent exits are partly responsible for the large US listing gap (Doidge et al., 2017). High merger probability stocks have positive 3-factor alphas and lower-than-average volatility. Firms with high drop probabilities have anomalously negative 3-, 4-, and 5-factor alphas between $-1.8$% and $-4$% per month. Results are robust to controlling for the effects of skewness, volatility, and turnover on returns.

M&A advisers can find and negotiate better deals for sellers, but hiring them entails fees and potential agency costs. Using a novel, hand-collected dataset on the hiring of seller advisers for a large sample of M&A deals, we find that private sellers use advisers or top-tier advisers when it makes economic sense. After accounting for this selection effect, advisers and top-tier advisers positively affect deal valuations. We find some evidence that acquirers’ announcement returns are lower in deals where private sellers use advisers. Our findings suggest that M&A advisers can find and negotiate better deals for private sellers.

Delta-hedged option returns consistently decrease in volatility of volatility changes (volatility uncertainty), for both implied and realized volatilities. We provide a thorough investigation of the underlying mechanisms including model-risk and gambling-preference channels. Uncertainty of both volatilities amplifies the model risk, leading to a higher option premium charged by dealers. Volatility of volatility-increases, rather than that of volatility-decreases, contributes to the effect of implied volatility uncertainty, supporting the gambling-preference channel. We further strengthen this channel by examining the effects of option end-users net demand and lottery-like features, and by decomposing implied volatility changes into systematic and idiosyncratic components.