We show that municipalities’ credit constraints can have important effects on local economies through a ratings channel. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation on U.S. municipal bond ratings due to Moody’s recalibration of its ratings scale in 2010. We find that local governments increase expenditures and employment due to an expansion of their debt capacity following a rat...

Investment banks legally pursue supposedly price stabilizing activities in the aftermarket of IPOs. We model the offering procedure as a signaling game and analyze how the possibility of potentially profitable trading in the aftermarket influences pricing decisions by investment banks. When maximizing the sum of both the gross spread of the offer revenue and profits from aftermarket trading, in...

We provide evidence for the importance of information asymmetry in asset pricing by using three natural experiments. Consistent with rational expectations models with multiple assets and multiple signals, we find that prices and uninformed demand fall as asymmetry increases. These falls are larger when more investors are uninformed, turnover is larger and more variable, payoffs are more uncerta...

Before the introduction of a call auction at the close, the last minute of trading at the Paris Bourse was the most active of the whole day. Even though the bid–ask spread increased substantially, the probability of large and aggressive orders increased, as did price volatility. In addition, both the one-minute returns and the proportion of partially hidden orders increased. In this paper, we d...

The Leech lattice A is a very dense packing of spheres in 24-dimensional Euclidean space, discovered by Leech (1967). Its automorphism group was determined by Conway (1969), and its usefulness as a source of codes for the Gaussian channel was studied by Blake (1971). The present note contains some comments on and corrections to the latter paper. Both Leech (1967) and Conway (1969) use essential...

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant impact on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation on corporate ratings due to ...

This study investigates the predictability of firm values for venture capital-backed firms. Having insights into the internal documents of more than 300 venture capitalists, we derive three common categories of firm value drivers: team characteristics, firm and market characteristics, and accounting information. Based on these value drivers, we provide a regression based valuation approach, whi...

There is a general perception that the large trading volume in initial public offerings is mostly due to ‘‘flippers’’ that are allocated shares in the offering and immediately resell them. On average, however, flipping accounts for only 19% of trading volume and 15% of shares offered during the first two days of trading. Institutions do more flipping than retail customers and hot IPOs are flipp...

We provide a new explanation for the apparent underpricing of initial public o®erings applicable to large, regulated ̄rms like telecommunications companies. Under the assumption that regulation is subject to political pressure by voters we demonstrate that it may be rational for issuers to ration investors in order to insure a broad distribution of shares in the population. At the same time we ...

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people’s desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are more likely to syndicate with each other. This homophily reduces the probability of investment success, and the detrimental effect ...