Burton Hollifield

Empirical Analysis of Limit Order Markets

We analyse order placement strategies in a limit order market, using data on the order flow from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Traders submitting market or limit orders trade off the order price against both the execution probability and the winner’s curse risk associated with different order choices. The optimal order strategy is characterized by a monotone function, which maps the liquidity demand of the investors into their order choice. We develop and implement a semiparametric test of this monotonicity property, and find no evidence against the monotonicity property for buy orders or sell orders. We do find evidence against the hypothesis that the trader’s decision to be a buyer or a seller depends only on the trading profits available in the limit order book. We estimate that traders submitting market buy orders have private valuations that exceed the asset value by 2.3% on average and receive an average payoff of at least 1.8% of the asset value. Traders submitting limit buy orders at the price below the best ask quote have private valuations between 0.1% and 2.3% above the asset value and earn an average payoff of between 0.3% and 1.8% of the asset value. Although the distribution of liquidity demand does not depend on conditioning information, conditioning information helps us to predict the composition of the order flow in our data. These findings imply that variation in the composition of the order flow can be explained by empirical variation in the relative profitability of alternative order choices and movements in the common value of the asset.

The personal-tax advantages of equity ☆

We compute the value of a firm that pays its cash flows each period through share repurchases in a dynamic environment where personal taxes are paid on realized capital gains and dividends. These results provide a measure of the personal tax advantages of equity financing relative to debt financing, which are often cited as increasing the cost of debt. The initial price of the firm depends on the present value of the taxes paid, which, in turn, depends on the initial price. We solve this valuation problem in closed form in a deterministic setting and numerically in a stochastic setting. We find significant valuation effects from the tax protection afforded by the equity basis. The tax savings are on the order of 40-50% of the taxes paid by the shareholders of firm that distributes cash through dividends, and the cost of capital is reduced by approximately 1% through the use of repurchases relative to dividends.

The Personal-Tax Advantages of Equity

We compute the value of a firm that pays its cash flows each period through share repurchases in a dynamic environment where personal taxes are paid on realized capital gains and dividends. These results provide a measure of the personal tax advantages of equity financing relative to debt financing, which are often cited as increasing the cost of debt. The initial price of the firm depends on the present value of the taxes paid, which, in turn, depends on the initial price. We solve this valuation problem in closed form in a deterministic setting and numerically in a stochastic setting. We find significant valuation effects from the tax protection afforded by the equity basis. The tax savings are on the order of 40-50% of the taxes paid by the shareholders of firm that distributes cash through dividends, and the cost of capital is reduced by approximately 1% through the use of repurchases relative to dividends.

Corporate Financing Decisions and Anonymous Trading

This study considers a model in which a corporate manager has private information and engages in i) anonymous trading on personal account in the secondary market, and ii) the corporate issuance of new shares in the primary market. The paper examines the equilibrium tradeoff of insider trading profits against the managers share of the corporate consequences of the primary issue. In the resulting equilibrium, managers, acting in their own best interests, seem to behave according to differing objective functions. In some cases, they seem to maximize intrinsic value, in others, insider trading profits seem to dominate, and still others seem to be concerned with both. Hence, the presence of anonymous trading around corporate financings brings into question the use of corporate objective functions with exogenously fixed weights.

What Broker Charges Reveal About Mortgage Credit Risk

Prior to the subprime crisis, mortgage brokers charged higher percentage fees for loans that turned out to be riskier ex post, even when conditioning on other risk characteristics. High conditional fees reveal borrower attributes that are associated with high borrower risk, such as suboptimal shopping behavior, high valuation for the loan or high borrower-specific broker costs. Borrowers who pay high conditional fees are inherently more risky, not just because they pay high fees. We find a stronger association between conditional fees and delinquency risk when lenders have fewer incentives to screen bor- rowers, for purchase rather than refinance loans, and for loans originated by brokers who have less frequent interactions with the lender. Our findings shed light on the pro- posed QRM exemption criteria for risk retention requirements for residential mortgage securitizations.

Defining Bad News: Changes in Return Distributions That Decrease Risky Asset Demand

We provide a random variable characterization of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a shift of the distribution of rate of return on the risky asset in the two-asset portfolio problem to reduce demand for all strictly risk-averse expected-utility-maximizing investors. We also provide random variable characterizations of the shifts that reduce both demand and expected utility for all strictly risk-averse investors.