Laurie Simon Hodrick

Predicting Equity Liquidity

In this paper we develop a measure of liquidity, price impact, which quantifies the change in a firms stock price associated with its observed net trading volume. For a large set of institutional trades we compare out-of-sample, characteristic-based estimates of price impact to actual price impacts. Predictive predetermined firm characteristics, chosen to proxy for the severity of adverse selection in the equity market, the non-information-based costs of making a market in the stock, and the extent of shareholder heterogeneity, include relative size, historical relative trading volume, institutional holdings, and the inverse of the stock price. We find numerous aspects of trade execution which are significantly related to the price impact forecast error in economically plausible ways: For example, the predicted price impact overestimates the actual price impact for very large trades, for trades executed in a more patient manner, and for trades where the institution pays higher commissions.

Self-Selection and Stock Returns Around Corporate Security Offering Announcements

Stock returns around security offering announcements are conditional on firms’ self-selection into a particular security type. We use a switching regression methodology on a data set of U.S. straight debt, convertible debt, and seasoned equity offerings to estimate counterfactual announcement returns that would be obtained had the same firms instead opted for alternative financing. Our evidence is consistent with firms choosing the financing type with the least negative expected announcement effect. Our results justify some observed pecking order behavior patterns better than do actual announcement effects, yet also suggest that for some firms equity-like financing may be preferred to debt-like financing.