This paper tests the hypothesis that irrational market misvaluation a#ects firms' takeover behavior. We employ two contemporaneous proxies for market misvaluation, pre-takeover book/price ratios and pre-takeover ratios of residual income model value to price. Misvaluation of bidders and targets influences the means of payment chosen, the mode of acquisition, the premia paid, target hostility to the o#er, the likelihood of o#er success, and bidder and target announcement period stock returns. The evidence is broadly supportive of the misvaluation hypothesis

During the 1980s, U.S. firms announcing stock repurchases earned favorable long-run returns. Recently, concerns have been raised over the robustness of these findings. This concern comes at a time of explosive growth in repurchase programs. Thus, we study new evidence from the 1990s for 1,060 Canadian repurchase programs. Moreover, because of Canadian law, we can carefully track repurchase activity monthly. Similar to the U.S., the Canadian stock market discounts the information in repurchase announcements, particularly for value stocks. Completion rates in Canada are sensitive to mispricing. Trades also appear linked to price movements; managers buy more shares when prices fall. 1 In recent years, corporations have dramatically increased the amount of capital devoted to repurchasing their own shares. In the mid-1980s, repurchase program announcements in the U.S. amounted to roughly $25 billion per year. Between 1996 and 1998 however, more than 4,000 open market repurchase programs w...

This paper

By examining how executive compensation structure determines corporate acquisition decisions, we document a strong positive relation between acquiring managers' equity-based compensation (EBC) and stock price performance around and following acquisition announcements. This relation is highly robust when we control for acquisition mode (mergers), means of payment, managerial ownership, and previous option grants. Compared to low EBC managers, high EBC managers pay lower acquisition premiums, acquire targets with higher growth opportunities, and make acquisitions engendering larger increases in firm risk. EBC significantly explains post-acquisition stock price performance even after controlling for acquisition mode, means of payment, and “glamour ” versus “value ” acquirers.

We examine the stock price reaction to earnings announcements in the five years following seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). On average, post-SEO earnings announcements are met with a significantly negative abnormal stock price reaction. Although this negative reaction accounts for a disproportionately large portion of long-run post-SEO abnormal stock returns, on average, abnormal stock price reactions to post-SEO earnings announcements are reliably negative only within the smallest quartile of equity issuers. For small firms, therefore, these findings are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that firms issue equity when the market over-estimates the firm’s future earnings performance.

This paper presents clinically-based studies of two acquisitions that received very different stock market reactions at announcements one positive and one negative. Despite the differing market reactions, we find that, ultimately, neither acquisition created value overall. In exploring the reasons for the acquisition outcomes, we rely primarily on interviews with managers and on internally generated performance data. We compare the results of these analyses to those from analyses of post-acquisition operating and stock price performance traditionally applied to large samples. We draw two primary conclusions. (1) Our findings highlight the difficulty of implementing a successful acquisition strategy and of running an effective internal capital market. Post-acquisition difficulties resulted because: (a) managers of the acquiring company did not deeply understand the target company at the time of the acquisition; (b) the acquirer imposed an inappropriate organizational design on the targ...

Research in behavioral corporate finance takes two distinct approaches. The first emphasizes that investors are less than fully rational. It views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational responses to securities market mispricing. The second approach emphasizes that managers are less than fully rational. It studies the effect of nonstandard preferences and judgmental biases on managerial decisions. This survey reviews the theory, empirical challenges, and current evidence pertaining to each approach. Overall, the behavioral approaches help to explain a number of important financing and investment patterns. The survey closes with a list of open questions.

Anomalies are empirical results that seem to be inconsistent with maintained theories of asset-pricing behavior. They indicate either market inefficiency (profit opportunities) or inadequacies in the underlying asset-pricing model. The evidence in this paper shows that the size effect, the value effect, the weekend effect, and the dividend yield effect seem to have weakened or disappeared after the papers that highlighted them were published. At about the same time, practitioners began investment vehicles that implemented the strategies implied by some of these academic papers. The small-firm turn-of-the-year effect became weaker in the years after it was first documented in the academic literature, although there is some evidence that it still exists. Interestingly, however, it does not seem to exist in the portfolio returns of practitioners who focus on small-capitalization firms. All of these findings raise the possibility that anomalies are more apparent than real. The notoriety associated with the findings of unusual evidence tempts authors to further investigate puzzling anomalies and later to try to explain them. But even if the anomalies existed in the sample

Four decades later, the CAPM is still widely used in applications, such as estimating the cost of capital for firms and evaluating the performance of managed portfolios. It is the centerpiece of MBA investment courses. Indeed, it is often the only asset pricing model taught in these courses. 1 The attraction of the CAPM is that it offers powerful and intuitively pleasing predictions about how to measure risk and the relation between expected return and risk. Unfortunately, the empirical record of the model is poor – poor enough to invalidate the way it is used in applications. The CAPM’s empirical problems may reflect theoretical failings, the result of many simplifying assumptions. But they may also be caused by difficulties in implementing valid tests of the model. For example, the CAPM says that the risk of a stock should be measured relative to a comprehensive “market portfolio ” that in principle can include not just traded financial assets, but also consumer durables, real estate, and human capital. Even if we

After 1979, the rate at which new firms are listed on the major U.S. stock exchanges increases sharply, asset growth rates of new lists are high, but their profitability declines and remains low for at least five years after listing. New lists also become less likely to survive, primarily because of delisting for poor performance. Overall, market prices reflect the volatile dynamics of new list fundamentals. Thus, for the full 1926 to 2000 period and the 1973 to 2000 Nasdaq period, value-weight and equalweight new list returns are close to benchmark returns. For the high action 1980 to 2000 period, equalweight new list returns are low, but value-weight returns are again close to benchmark returns. * Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago (Fama), and Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College (French). We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Frank Easterbrook, Kenneth Lehn, Jonathan Macey, Richard Roll, Hans Stoll, and seminar participants at UCLA. The market...