Joshua D. Coval

Home Bias at Home: Local Equity Preference in Domestic Portfolios

The strong bias in favor of domestic securities is a well-documented characteristic of international investment portfolios, yet we show that the preference for investing close to home also applies to portfolios of domestic stocks. Specifically, U.S. investment managers exhibit a strong preference for locally headquartered firms, particularly small, highly levered firms that produce nontraded goods. These results suggest that asymmetric information between local and nonlocal investors may drive the preference for geographically proximate investments, and the relation between investment proximity and firm size and leverage may shed light on several well-documented asset pricing anomalies.

Asset fire sales (and purchases) in equity markets

Abstract This paper examines institutional price pressure in equity markets by studying mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2004. Funds experiencing large outflows tend to decrease existing positions, which creates price pressure in the securities held in common by distressed funds. Similarly, the tendency among funds experiencing large inflows to expand existing positions creates positive price pressure in overlapping holdings. Investors who trade against constrained mutual funds earn significant returns for providing liquidity. In addition, future flow-driven transactions are predictable, creating an incentive to front-run the anticipated forced trades by funds experiencing extreme capital flows.

The Economics of Structured Finance

T he essence of structured finance activities is the pooling of economic assets like loans, bonds, and mortgages, and the subsequent issuance of a prioritized capital structure of claims, known as tranches, against these collateral pools. As a result of the prioritization scheme used in structuring claims, many of the manufactured tranches are far safer than the average asset in the underlying pool. This ability of structured finance to repackage risks and to create “safe” assets from otherwise risky collateral led to a dramatic expansion in the issuance of structured securities, most of which were viewed by investors to be virtually risk-free and certified as such by the rating agencies. At the core of the recent financial market crisis has been the discovery that these securities are actually far riskier than originally advertised. We examine how the process of securitization allowed trillions of dollars of risky assets to be transformed into securities that were widely considered to be safe, and argue that two key features of the structured finance machinery fueled its spectacular growth. First, we show that most securities could only have received high credit ratings if the rating agencies were extraordinarily confident about their ability to estimate the underlying securities’ default risks, and how likely defaults were to be correlated. Using the prototypical structured finance security—the collateralized debt obligation (CDO)—as an example, we illustrate that issuing a capital structure amplifies errors in evaluating the risk of the underlying securities.

Economic Catastrophe Bonds

The central insight of asset pricing is that a securitys value depends both on its distribution of payoffs across economic states and on state prices. In fixed income markets, many investors focus exclusively on estimates of expected payoffs, such as credit ratings, without considering the state of the economy in which default occurs. Such investors are likely to be attracted to securities whose payoffs resemble economic catastrophe bonds—bonds that default only under severe economic conditions. We show that many structured finance instruments can be characterized as economic catastrophe bonds, but offer far less compensation than alternatives with comparable payoff profiles. (JEL G11, G12)

Corporate financing decisions when investors take the path of least resistance

Abstract We argue that inertial behavior on the part of investors can have significant consequences for corporate financial policy. One implication of investor inertia is that it improves the terms for the acquiring firm in a stock-for-stock merger, because acquirer shares are placed in the hands of investors, who, independent of their beliefs, do not resell these shares on the open market. In the presence of a downward-sloping demand curve, this leads to a reduction in price pressure and, hence, to cheaper equity financing. We develop a simple model to illustrate this idea and present supporting empirical evidence.

Index Option Prices and Stock Market Momentum

We test the prediction of standard option pricing models that there should be no relation between option prices and past stock market movements. Using the Standard and Poors 100 index options (OEX options) prices from 19831995, we document that OEX calls are significantly overvalued relative to OEX puts after large stock price increases. The reverse is true after large stock price decreases. These valuation effects are both economically and statistically significant. Our results suggest that past stock returns exert an important influence on index option prices.

Internal Financing of Multinational Subsidiaries: Debt vs. Equity

We show that an optimal tax management strategy for financing of subsidiaries by multinational corporations, that takes into account exploitation of tax-loss credits, may involve the use of both intra-firm parent debt as well as intra-firm parent equity. This is in contrast to the textbook argument that suggests a knife-edged subsidiary capital structure that, depending on the tax-rate differential between countries, uses either all debt or all equity. We develop a formal multi-period dynamic model to characterize the optimal dividend repatriation policy and the optimal choice of debt-equity mix. The model generates several testable empirical implications that are consistent with available empirical evidence and several others that have not been either discussed or empirically tested in the literature.

Deriving by Doing: A New Approach to Teaching Finance

This document describes how interactive market simulations are used to teach finance in the Dynamic Markets course at Harvard Business School. The course is organized around hands-on application in a wide variety of capital market settings with the goal of producing experts in financial decision-making. The essential aspects of this pedagogy are dynamic decision settings, a strong reliance on competitive markets, and derivation of core concepts through active student decision-making.

Reply: Do Powerful Politicians Really Cause Corporate Downsizing?

We first want to say that we believe the close examination of the methodology and robustness of published studies is absolutely necessary in our profession. We commend Snyder and Welch for their effort in following up with the data and code we posted on our sites and for investigating the questions explored in our paper in this Journal (Cohen, Coval, and Malloy 2011). We have had an engaging conversation with them for the past few years and we have enjoyed it. This having been said, we still donot agreewith the analysis, inferences, and conclusions of Snyder and Welch’s comment. Indeed, their concerns have prompted us to carry out a large amount of additional analysis—including a number of tests that address critiques that have since been dropped from the current version of their paper—that has only strengthened our confidence in our results. Themain tables of our origi-