Session 2
Efficient Capital Markets and Capital Structure
FIN 625: Corporate Finance
Learning Objectives
LO 1: Explain an efficient market and its three types.
LO 2: Explain the three foundations for market efficiency.
LO 3: Discuss the evidence for the efficiency of the market.
LO 4: Explain the challenges for the three foundations of
market efficiency and some empirical evidence brought
about by Behavioral Finance.
LO 5: Explain the intuition behind homemade leverage and
Modigliani-Miller Proposition I & II for capital structure
without corporate taxes.
Outline
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)
Behavioral Finance
Empirical Challenges to EMH
Implications of EMH for Corporate
Finance
Capital Structure and Firm Value
Capital Structure Without Corporate
Taxes
1. Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)

An efficient capital market is one in which
security prices fully and quickly reflect all
available information.

If current price already reflects this information,
such information will not be able to predict
future prices.
Stock Price Reactions
Stock
Price
Overreaction to “good
news”
Efficient market
response to “good
news”
-30
-20
-10
Delayed
response to
“good news”
0
+10 +20 +30
Days before (-) and after (+)
announcement
Stock Price Reactions
Stock
Price
Efficient market
response to “bad
news”
-30
-20
-10
Overreaction to “bad news”
Delayed
response to
“bad news”
0
+10
+20
+30
Days before (-) and after (+)
announcement
Foundations of Market Efficiency



Investor Rationality
Independent Deviations from Rationality
No Arbitrage
The Different Types of Efficiency

Weak Form


Semistrong Form


Security prices reflect all information in past
prices.
Security prices reflect all publicly available
information.
Strong Form

Security prices reflect all information—public and
private.
Information Sets
All information
relevant to a stock
Information set
of publicly available
information
Information
set of
past prices
Weak Form Market Efficiency

Security prices reflect all information found
in past prices.

If the weak form of market efficiency holds,
then technical analysis is not valuable.

Since stock prices only respond to new
information, which by definition arrives
randomly, stock prices are said to follow a
random walk.
Stock Price
Why Technical Analysis Fails
Investor behavior tends to eliminate any profit
opportunity associated with stock price patterns.
Sell
Sell
Buy
Buy
If it were possible to
make big money simply
by finding “the pattern” in
the stock price
movements, everyone
would do it, and the
profits would be
competed away.
Time
Semistrong Form Market Efficiency


Security prices reflect all publicly
available information.
Publicly available information includes:




Historical price and volume information
Published financial statements
Any events that could affect the stock prices
(Congress passes the new financial bill, Fed
increases the interest rate, etc.)
If semistrong form of market efficiency holds,
then fundamental analysis is not valuable.
Strong Form Market Efficiency

Security prices reflect all information—
public and private.

Strong form efficiency incorporates weak
and semistrong form efficiency.

Strong form efficiency says that anything
pertinent to the stock and known to at
least one investor is already incorporated
into the security’s price.
What the EMH Does and Does NOT Say

Investors can throw darts to select stocks.



Price fluctuates daily and hence is
inconsistent with market efficiency.




This is almost, but not entirely, true.
An investor must still decide how risky a portfolio he/she
wants based on risk aversion and the expected return.
This is incorrect.
Prices reflect information.
New information may arrive daily.
Prices are random so uncaused.

The price CHANGE is driven by new information, which by
definition arrives randomly.
The Evidence

The record on the EMH is extensive. There
are both supporting and contradicting
evidence.

Studies fall into three broad categories:
1.
Are changes in stock prices random? Are there
profitable “trading rules?”
2.
Event studies: does the market quickly and
accurately respond to new information?
3.
The record of professionally managed
investment firms.
Are Changes in Stock Prices Random?

Can we really tell?



A matter of degree


Many psychologists and statisticians believe that
most people want to see patterns even when faced
with pure randomness.
People claiming to see patterns in stock price
movements are probably seeing optical illusions.
Even if we can spot patterns, we need to have
returns that beat our transactions costs.
Random stock price changes support weak
form efficiency.
What Pattern Do You See?
Randomly Selected Numbers
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
17
19
21
23
25
Event Studies

Event Studies are one type of test of the
semistrong form of market efficiency.



Recall, this form of the EMH implies that prices
should reflect all publicly available information.
To test this, event studies examine prices and
returns over time—particularly around the
arrival of new information.
Test for evidence of underreaction, overreaction,
early reaction, or delayed reaction around the
event.
Event Study Results

Over the years, event study methodology has been
applied to a large number of events including:





Dividend increases and decreases
Earnings announcements
Mergers
New Issues of Stock
The studies generally support the view that the market
is semistrong form efficient.
The Record of Mutual Funds


If the market is semistrong form efficient,
then no matter what publicly available
information mutual fund managers rely on to
pick stocks, their average returns should be
the same as those of the average investor in
the market as a whole.
We can test efficiency by comparing the
performance of professionally managed
mutual funds with the performance of a
market index.
The Record of Mutual Funds
All funds
Smallcompany
growth
Otheraggressive
growth
-2.13%
Growth
Income
-0.39%
-2.17%
Growth and Maximum
income
capital gains
Sector
-1.06%
-0.51%
-2.29%
-5.41%
-8.45%
Taken from Lubos Pastor and Robert F. Stambaugh, “Mutual Fund Performance and Seemingly Unrelated Assets,”
Journal of Financial Economics, 63 (2002).
The Strong Form of the EMH



One group of studies of strong form of
market efficiency investigates insider
trading.
A number of studies support the view that
insider trading is abnormally profitable.
Thus, strong form efficiency does not
seem to be substantiated by the evidence.
2. Behavioral Finance

Rationality


People are not always rational.
Many investors fail to diversify, trade too
much, and seem not to try to minimize taxes
by selling winners and holding losers.
Behavioral Finance

Independent Deviations from Rationality

Psychologists argue that people deviate from
rationality in predictable ways:

Representativeness: drawing conclusions from
too little data (“law of small numbers”)


This can lead to bubbles in security prices (subprime
crisis…).
Conservatism: people are too slow in adjusting
their beliefs to new information.

Security prices seem to respond too slowly to earnings
surprises.
Behavioral Finance
Behavioral Finance

Arbitrage




But what if the rest of the investment community doesn’t
come to their senses in time for you to cover your short
position?


Suppose that your superior, rational analysis shows that
company ABC is overpriced.
Arbitrage would suggest that you should short the shares.
After the rest of the investors come to their senses, you make
money because you were smart enough to “sell high and buy
low.”
This makes arbitrage risky.
Limits to Arbitrage

“Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
John Maynard Keynes
3. Empirical Challenges to EMH

Earnings Surprises



Size


Stock prices adjust slowly to earnings
announcements.
Behavioralists claim that investors exhibit
conservatism.
Small cap stocks seem to outperform large cap
stocks.
Value (low market-to-book or low P/E) versus
Growth (high market-to-book or high P/E)

Value stocks outperform growth stocks.
Empirical Challenges to EMH

Crashes



On October 19, 1987, the stock market
dropped between 20 and 25 percent on a
Monday following a weekend during which
little surprising news was released.
A drop of this magnitude for no apparent
reason is inconsistent with market efficiency.
Bubbles


Subprime housing and the financial crisis
Tech stock bubble of the late 1990s.
4. Implications of EMH for
Corporate Finance


The EMH has some implications for corporate
finance. For example:
1.
The price of a company’s stock cannot be affected
by a change in accounting.
2.
Financial managers cannot “time” issues of stocks
and bonds using publicly available information.
3.
An acquiring firm cannot buy an “under-valued” firm
in a mergers & acquisition transaction.
There is conflicting empirical evidence on all
these points.
5. Capital Structure and Firm Value

The value of a firm is defined to be the sum of
the value of the firm’s debt and the firm’s equity.
V=B+S
• If the goal of the firm’s
management is to make the
firm as valuable as possible,
then the firm should pick the
debt-equity ratio that makes
the pie as big as possible.
S B
Value of the Firm
Importance of Capital Structure

Taken from Servaes and Tufano (2006): CFO Views on the Importance and Execution of the
Finance Function.
Importance of Target Debt Ratio

Graham and Harvey (2001) found that 81% of
the firms have target debt ratio.
6. Capital Structure Without
Corporate Taxes





Key Assumptions:
No corporate taxes (to be relaxed later);
No costs of financial distress (to be
relaxed later);
Fixed investment policy;
Individuals can borrow as cheaply as
firms.
Example: Capital Structure, EPS, and
ROE
Consider an all-equity firm that is considering going
into debt (Maybe some of the original shareholders
want to cash out). There are no taxes.
Current
Assets
$20,000
Debt
$0
Equity
$20,000
Debt/Equity ratio
0.00
Interest rate
n/a
Shares outstanding 400
Share price
$50
Proposed
$20,000
$8,000
$12,000
2/3
8%
240
$50
EPS and ROE Under Current Structure
Recession Expected Expansion
EBIT
$1,000 $2,000 $3,000
Interest
0
0
0
Net income $1,000 $2,000 $3,000
EPS
_$2.5_ _$5.00_ _$7.50_
ROA
_5%_ _10%_ _15%_
ROE
_5%_ _10%_ _15%_
Current Shares Outstanding = 400 shares
EPS and ROE Under Proposed Structure
Recession Expected Expansion
EBIT
$1,000 $2,000 $3,000
Interest
640
640
640
Net income
$360 $1,360 $2,360
EPS
_$1.50_ _$5.67_ _$9.83_
ROA
_1.8%_ _6.8%_ _11.8%_
ROE
_3.0%_ _11.3%_ _19.7%_
Proposed Shares Outstanding = 240 shares
Financial Leverage and EPS
12.00
Debt
10.00
EPS
8.00
6.00
4.00
No Debt
Advantage
to debt
Break-even
point
2.00
0.00
1,000
(2.00)
2,000
Disadvantage to debt
3,000
EBIT in dollars, no taxes
Homemade Leverage: An Example
Recession Expected Expansion
EPS of Unlevered Firm
$2.50
$5.00
$7.50
Earnings for 40 shares _$100_ _$200_
_$300_
Less interest on $800 (8%)_$64_
_$64_
_$64_
Net Profits
_$36_ _$136_
_$236_
ROE (Net Profits / $1,200)_3.0%_ _11.3%_ _19.7%_
We are buying 40 shares of a $50 stock, using $800 in
margin. We get the same ROE as if we bought into a
levered firm.
B $800 2
Our personal debt-equity ratio is: S  $1,200  3
Homemade (Un)Leverage: An Example
Recession Expected Expansion
EPS of Levered Firm
$1.50
$5.67
$9.83
Earnings for 24 shares
$36
$136
$236
Plus interest on $800 (8%) $64
$64
$64
Net Profits
$100
$200
$300
ROE (Net Profits / $2,000)
5%
10%
15%
Buying 24 shares of an otherwise identical levered firm
along with some of the firm’s debt gets us to the ROE of the
unlevered firm.
This is the fundamental insight of M&M.
MM Proposition I (No Taxes)


We can create a levered or unlevered
position by adjusting the trading in our
own account.
This homemade leverage suggests that
capital structure is irrelevant in
determining the value of the firm:
VL = VU
MM Proposition II (No Taxes)

Proposition II

Leverage increases the risk and return to
stockholders
Rs = R0 + (B / SL) (R0 - RB)
RB is the yield on debt (cost of debt)
Rs is the return on (levered) equity (cost of equity)
R0 is the return on unlevered equity / return on
asset
B is the value of debt
SL is the value of levered equity
MM Proposition II (No Taxes)
The derivation is straightforward (first equation
is by M&M Prop I): R  R  B  R  S  R
0
B
S
 RB 
 RS  R0
BS
BS
BS
BS
multiply both sides by
S
V
BS
B
S
BS
B
BS
S
BS

 RB 

 RS 
R0
S
BS
S
BS
S
B
BS
 RB  RS 
R0
S
S
B
B
 RB  RS  R0  R0
S
S
B
RS  R0  ( R0  RB )
S
Cost of capital: R (%)
MM Proposition II (No Taxes)
RS  R0 
B
 ( R0  RB )
SL
R0
RB
RB
Debt-to-equity Ratio B
S
Readings

Chapter 13, 14 (14.1-14.4)