Frank Zhang

Understanding the Role of Recovery in Default Risk Models: Empirical Comparisons and Implied Recovery Rates

This article presents a framework for modeling defaultable debt under alternative recovery conventions (for a wide class of processes describing recovery rates and default probability). These debt models have the ability to differentiate the impact of recovery rates and default probability, and can be utilized to invert the market expectation of recovery rates implicit in bond prices. Among potential applications, the framework can be used for pricing and hedging credit derivatives that are contingent on the default event and/or recovery levels. Empirical implementation of these models suggests two central findings. First, the recovery concept that specifies recovery as a fraction of the discounted par value has broader empirical support. Second, parametric debt valuation models can provide a useful assessment of recovery rates embedded in bond prices. This article has attempted to model recovery and comprehend their impact on debt values.

High-Frequency Trading, Stock Volatility, and Price Discovery

High-frequency trading has become a dominant force in the U.S. capital market, accounting for over 70% of dollar trading volume. This study examines the implication of high-frequency trading for stock price volatility and price discovery. I find that high-frequency trading is positively correlated with stock price volatility after controlling for firm fundamental volatility and other exogenous determinants of volatility. The positive correlation is stronger among the top 3,000 stocks in market capitalization and among stocks with high institutional holdings. The positive correlation is also stronger during periods of high market uncertainty. Furthermore, I find that high-frequency trading is negatively related to the market’s ability to incorporate information about firm fundamentals into asset prices. Stock prices tend to overreact to fundamental news when high-frequency trading is at a high volume. Overall, this paper demonstrates that high-frequency trading may potentially have some harmful effects for the U.S. capital market.

What Did the Credit Market Expect of Argentina Default? Evidence from Default Swap Data

This article explores the expectations of the credit market by developing a parsimonious default swap model, which is versatile enough to disentangle default probability from the expected recovery rate, accommodate counterparty default risk, and allow flexible correlation between state variables. We implements the model to a unique sample of default swaps on Argentine sovereign debt, and found that the risk-neutral default probability was always higher than its physical counterpart, and the wedge between the two was affected by changes in the business cycle, the U.S. and Argentine credit conditions, and the overall strength of the Argentine economy. We also found that major rating agencies had assigned over-generous ratings to the Argentine debt, and they lagged the market in downgrading the debt.

Valuation of Tax Expense

As tax expense reflects value lost to taxes paid, it should be negatively associated with value, provided nontax, value-relevant information is controlled for. However, valuation regressions estimated in prior research—using contemporaneous tax expense and nontax variables—document substantial variation in the coefficients on tax expense, ranging from significant negative to significant positive values. We show this variation is (a) caused by the omission of expected future profitability, and (b) explained by many factors that cause variation in the correlations among included variables and omitted future profitability. Unfortunately, difficulties associated with separating the impact of individual factors hampers tax research investigating determinants of the value relevance of tax expense.

Investment Cash Flow Sensitivities Really Reflect Related Investment Decisions

An important, unresolved issue in finance is whether the sensitivity of capital investment to internally generated cash flows reflects the impact of binding financing constraints on firms’ investment decisions. We contribute new insight to this debate by providing systematic evidence that investment-cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) primarily reflects the fundamental connection between capital investment and working capital investment as interrelated manifestations of firm growth. We decompose the cash flow measure used in the literature, earnings before depreciation (EBD), into cash flow from operations (CFO), and working capital accruals (WCACC) which reflects net investment in working capital items like inventory and accounts receivable. We demonstrate that ICFS is driven by the natural co-movement between fixed investment and the working capital investment aspect of WCACC as complementary factors of production. In contrast, investment-CFO sensitivity is often negative and tends to decrease as financing constraints increase, inconsistent with CFO serving as a source of investment financing for constrained firms. What does this growth interpretation imply about the connection between ICFS and financing constraints? We argue that the nature of ICFS depends directly on the underlying catalyst of firm growth. If investment is driven solely by a reduction in the cost wedge between external and internal financing, ICFS reflects the investment consequences of this reduction in financing constraints. However, if capacity expansion is instead driven by macro shifts in the opportunity cost of firms’ internal funds, shocks in investment opportunities, empire building behavior, or managerial irrationality, ICFS will not reflect financing frictions but rather the natural consequence of capacity expansion on the co-movement of fixed and working capital investment.

Trading Activity and Price Volatility in the Municipal Bond Market

Utilizing a comprehensive database of transactions in municipal bonds, we investigate the volume-volatility relationship in the muni market. We find a positive relationship between the number of transactions and a bonds price volatility. In contrast to previous studies, we find a negative relationship between average deal size and price volatility. These results are found to be robust throughout the sample. Our results are inconsistent with current theoretical models of the volume-volatility relationship. These inconsistencies may arise because current models fail to account for the effects of overall market liquidity on the costs of large transactions.

Fundamental Analysis and Option Returns

This paper investigates whether fundamental accounting information is appropriately priced in the options market. We find that fundamental accounting signals exhibit incremental predictive power with respect to future option returns above and beyond what is captured by implied and historical stock volatility, suggesting that the options market does not fully incorporate fundamental information into option prices. Transaction costs substantially reduce the overall profitability of hedge strategies that exploit the information in these fundamental accounting signals, but the strategies still earn economically and statistically significant returns for options with low transaction costs.

Understanding Two Remarkable Findings about Stock Yields and Growth

Two regularities regarding stock prices and expected inflation have received less attention than they deserve. First, earnings and dividend yields move with long-term expected inflation and risk-free rates. Second, analysts’ forecasts of nominal growth, not real growth, vary little with expected inflation. These patterns are remarkable because financial economists predict exactly the opposite. One explanation for these contrary findings is that stock prices are too high (low) when inflation is low (high), because investors confuse nominal and real growth rates. The authors assert that investors are unlikely to be so systematically naive about expected inflation and argue that the contrary evidence is, in fact, consistent with a rational market. The key insight offered by the authors is that reported earnings include inflationary holding gains, which causes higher earnings yields when inflation is high (the first regularity) and, in turn, explains why forecasts of nominal growth need not vary with inflation (the second regularity).

Spring-Loading Future Performance When No One is Looking? Earnings and Cash Flow Management Around Acquisitions

We find evidence that performance—reflected in earnings and cash flows—is transferred from targets to acquirers around acquisitions. Using a sample of 2128 completed deals from 1985 to 2010, our results suggest that targets depress performance when investor attention declines once the deal parameters are set, and much of that performance understatement is transferred to boost post-acquisition acquirer performance. Evidence of variation across subsamples provides additional confirmation: transfers are more visible for large deals (with transfers large enough to be detected) and muted for pooling transactions (with lower incentives to transfer). We contribute to the earnings management literature by showing that earnings and cash flows are transferred not just within firms but also across firms, and to the mergers and acquisitions literature by documenting that performance is managed not only before but also after deals are announced.

Information Uncertainty and Acquirer Wealth Losses

A large body of literature demonstrates that acquisitions are on average value-destroying for the acquirer. We investigate whether the change in the acquirer’s information uncertainty contributes to acquirer wealth losses. Information uncertainty affects the discount rate (the cost of capital), which in turn influences stock price. Our results indicate that acquisitions lead to increases in information uncertainty, as proxied by analysts’ earnings forecast dispersion. We also find that the change in information uncertainty is negatively related to acquirer long-term stock performance, after controlling for the acquirer’s fundamentals. Taken together, the evidence is consistent with the conclusion that increases in information uncertainty resulting from acquisitions contribute to acquirer post-acquisition wealth losses.