Asset Management

This paper investigates the interaction between synergies and internal agency conflicts that emerges endogenously in multi-division firms. A divisional manager's entrenchment choice depends directly on the specificity of her division's assets, because the specificity governs whether entrenchment activities reduce the likelihood of her division being divested. The presence of synergies, by modifying the difference between the value of assets in their current use and in alternative uses, may alter the divisional manager's entrenchment incentive.

This paper yields a summary score that informs about the sustainability (or persistence) of earnings and about the trailing P/E ratio. The score is delivered from a model that identifies unsustainable earnings from the financial statements by exploiting accounting relations that require that unsustainable earnings leave a trail in the accounts. The paper also builds a P/E model that recognizes that investors buy future earnings, so should pay less for current earnings if those earnings cannot be sustained in the future.

Multidivisional firms frequently rely on external market prices in order to value internal transactions across profit centers. This paper examines the transfer pricing problem in a setting in which an upstream division has monopoly power in selling a proprietary component both to a downstream division within the same firm and to external customers. When internal transfers are valued at the prevailing market price, the resulting transactions are distorted by double marginalization.

The 1993 Japanese financial system reform allowed banks to enter the underwriting market for corporate bonds through bank-owned security subsidiaries. This paper examines empirically whether underwriting commissions and yield spreads on corporate straight bonds issued domestically fell as a result of this bank entry. The empirical results show that bank entry significantly lowers both underwriting commissions and yield spreads. Commissions charged by banks are significantly lower than those charged by investment houses.

The accruals anomaly—the negative relationship between accounting accruals and subsequent stock returns—has been well documented in the academic and practitioner literatures for almost a decade. To the extent that this anomaly represents market inefficiency, one would expect sophisticated investors to learn about it and arbitrage the anomaly away. Yet, we show that the accruals anomaly still persists and its magnitude has not declined over time.

The role of private equity in global capital markets appears to be expanding at an extraordinary rate. Morgan Stanley estimates that there are now some 2,700 private equity funds that either have raised, or are in the process of raising, a total of $500 billion. With this abundance of available equity capital, the willingness of private equity firms to participate in "club" deals, and the leverage that can be put on top of the equity, private equity buyers now appear able and willing to pay higher prices for assets than ever before.

Many corporate executives view private equity as a last resort, as expensive capital that should be tapped only by companies that don't have access to presumably cheaper public equity. The reality of private equity, however, is more complex, and potentially quite rewarding, for both shareholders and management. This paper surveys some of the academic work on the costs and benefits of public vs. private equity, contrasting the private equity investment process with its public counterpart and exploring how such a process may add value.

We show that the accrual anomaly documented by Sloan (1996) [Do stock prices fully reflect information in accruals and cash flows about future earnings? The Accounting Review 71: 289–315] is concentrated in firms with high idiosyncratic stock return volatility making it risky for risk-averse arbitrageurs to take positions in stocks with extreme accruals. Moreover, the accrual anomaly is found in low-price and low-volume stocks, suggesting that transaction costs impose further barriers to exploiting accrual mispricing.

Focusing on asset returns governed by a factor structure, the APT is a one-period model, in which preclusion of arbitrage over static portfolios of these assets leads to a linear relation between the expected return and its covariance with the factors. The APT, however, does not preclude arbitrage over dynamic portfolios. Consequently, applying the model to evaluate managed portfolios is contradictory to the no-arbitrage spirit of the model.