An important element in the survival of organizational forms is control of agency problems. Agency problems arise because contracts are not costlessly written and enforced. Agency costs include the costs of structuring, monitoring, and bonding a set of contracts among agents with conflicting interests, plus the residual loss incurred because the cost of full enforcement of contracts exceeds the…
The purpose here is to explain the survival of organizations characterized by separation of ownership and control. The separation of decision and risk-bearing functions observed in large corporations is common to other organizations, such as large professional partnerships, financial mutuals, and nonprofits. The separation of decision and risk-bearing functions survives in these organizations i…
The separation of security ownership and control is presented as an efficient form of economic organization. The presumption that a corporation has owners in any meaningful sense is set aside, along with the concept of the entrepreneur. The functions of management and risk bearing are treated as naturally separate factors within the set of contracts called a firm. The firm is disciplined by com…
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The book-to-market ratio (B/M) is a noisy measure of expected stock returns because it also varies with expected cashflows. Our hypothesis is that the evolution of B/M, in terms of past changes in book equity and price, contains independent information about expected cashflows that can be used to improve estimates of expected returns. The tests support this hypothesis, with results that are lar…
The anomalous returns associated with net stock issues, accruals, and momentum are pervasive; they show up in all size groups (micro, small, and big) in cross-section regressions, and they are also strong in sorts, at least in the extremes. The asset growth and profitability anomalies are less robust. There is an asset growth anomaly in average returns on microcaps and small stocks, but it is a…
Average returns on value and growth portfolios are broken into dividends and three sources of capital gain: (1) growth in book equity, primarily from earnings retention, (2) convergence in price-to-book ratios (P/Bs)from mean reversion in profitability and expected returns, and (3) upward drift in P/B during 1927-2006. The capital gains of value stocks trace mostly to convergence: P/B rises as …
We examine (1) how value premiums vary with firm size, (2) whether the CAPM explains value premiums, and (3) whether, in general, average returns compensate B in the way predicted by the CAPM. Loughran's (1997) evidence for a weak value premium among large firms is special to 1963 to 1995, U.S. stocks, and the book-to-market value-growth indicator. Ang and Chen's (2005) evidence that the CAPM c…
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