Robin Greenwood
There are 12 articles for this faculty member.
About Faculty in this Article:
Robin Greenwood is an associate professor in the Finance unit at Harvard Business School.
Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns
| Authors: | Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 24, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
In research that could help regulators and policymakers tell if credit markets are becoming overheated, HBS professor Robin Greenwood and doctoral candidate Samuel G. Hanson suggest that measures of credit quality are just as important to monitor as the more traditional reviews of credit quantity. They also find that time-varying investor beliefs such as over-optimism, or tastes such as a heightened tolerance for risk, can contribute to fluctuations in credit quantity.
Published in 2010
A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity
| Authors: | Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson, and Jeremy C. Stein |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 16, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | September, 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Can the government do anything to discourage short-term borrowing by the private sector? HBS Professor Robin Greenwood, Harvard University and Harvard Business School PhD candidate Samuel Hanson, and Harvard University Professor Jeremy C. Stein suggest the government could actively influence the corporate sector's borrowing decisions by shifting its own financing between T-bills and bonds.
How Government can Discourage Private Sector Reliance on Short-Term Debt
| Q&A with: | Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 13, 2010 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Financial institutions have relied increasingly and excessively on short-term financing--putting the overall system at risk. Should government step in? Harvard researchers Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson, and Jeremy C. Stein propose a "comparative advantage approach" that allows government to actively influence the corporate sector's borrowing decisions.
Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure
| Authors: | Sergey Chernenko, C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | June 9, 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Under what circumstances do firms access capital markets when the potential for agency costs is high? The prevailing view holds that controlling shareholders sell shares to outsiders only when internal capital is inadequate to fund attractive investment opportunities. While the role of market efficiency in corporate finance has attracted considerable research attention, the interaction of stock market mispricing with agency problems is not well understood. HBS doctoral graduate Sergey Chernenko and professors C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood propose a new explanation—based on stock market mispricing—for why firms with a controlling shareholder raise outside equity, even when firms cannot commit not to expropriate minority shareholders.
Published in 2009
Stock Price Fragility
| Authors: | Robin Greenwood and David Thesmar |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 27, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Does the composition of ownership of a financial asset influence future returns and risk? Previous economic research has documented significant price effects of investor demand in numerous settings, including retail demand for options, investor demand for bonds, and mutual funds' flow-driven demand for stocks. This paper provides a methodology to identify assets that are vulnerable to such investor demand shocks. The central idea is that assets are risky if the current owners of the asset face correlated liquidity shocks—i.e., they buy and sell at the same time. We call assets with a high concentration of owners who trade in the same direction "fragile." A related concept is "co-fragility." Two assets are "co-fragile" if their owners have correlated trading needs, even if the holdings of these owners do not directly overlap. The authors build measures of fragility for U.S. stocks between 1990 and 2007. Consistent with their predictions, more fragile stocks are more volatile, and two co-fragile stocks exhibit high correlations among their stock returns.
Catering to Characteristics
| Authors: | Robin Greenwood and Samuel Hanson |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 20, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | March 2009 (revised June 2009) |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Can patterns of corporate net stock issuance help identify times when particular characteristics, such as industry, size, or book-to-market ratio, are mispriced? The authors of this study argue that differences between the characteristics of issuers and repurchasers can shed light on characteristic related stock returns. Consider the case in which analysts were interested in forecasting the returns of Google. The standard approach would be to collect Google's characteristics (e.g., large, technology, non-dividend paying, etc) and associate these characteristics with an average return in the cross-section. The authors argue that if other stocks with these characteristics are issuing stock, this bodes poorly for Google's future returns, even if Google is itself not issuing. This research by HBS professor Robin Greenwood and Harvard doctoral student Samuel Hanson has implications for studying the stock market performance of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), initial public offerings (IPOs), and recent acquirers.
Published in 2007
The Hedge Fund as Activist
| Published: | August 22, 2007 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Do hedge funds improve management of the companies they invest in? A new study by Harvard Business School professor Robin Greenwood and coauthor Michael Schor argues that, in fact, hedge funds create shareholder value through anticipation of change, not necessarily delivering it.
Hedge Fund Investor Activism and Takeovers
| Authors: | Robin Greenwood and Michael Schor |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 20, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Are hedge funds better than large institutional investors at identifying undervalued companies, locating potential acquirers for them, and removing opposition to a takeover? Are they best equipped to monitor management? While blockholding by large institutional investors—pension funds and mutual fund investment companies—is widespread, there is virtually no evidence that these institutional shareholders are effective monitors of management or that their presence in the capital structure increases firm value. When institutional blockholders make formal demands on management, there is no evidence of their success. This working paper outlines the advantages and limits of hedge funds to manage these tasks. Greenwood and Schor's characterization differs markedly from previous work on investor activism, which tends to attribute high announcement returns to improvements in operational performance.
Inexperienced Investors and Market Bubbles
| Q&A with: | Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 19, 2007 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
The evidence isn't conclusive, but new research from Harvard Business School suggests younger fund managers may have contributed to the tech stock bubble. Professor Robin Greenwood discusses the research paper, "Inexperienced Investors and Bubbles," and what mutual fund investors should keep in mind.
Published in 2006
The Trouble Behind Livedoor
| Q&A with: | Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 6, 2006 |
| Feature: | Views on News |
When Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie was arrested last month, it shook the economic underpinnings of Japan. Professor Robin Greenwood discusses what went wrong with one of that country's most-watched Internet companies.
Published in 2005
Float Manipulation and Stock Prices
| Author: | Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2005, revised February 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
When a firm reduces the number of shares available to trade, so-called float manipulation, the price of the stock is often driven up. The author uses a series of 2,000 stock split events in Japan as an experiment to understand the consequences of float manipulation for stock prices. The conclusion: Stock prices are raised significantly when there are differing opinions about the value of shares, investors are unable to sell short, and the number of outstanding shares is reduced.
A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Excess Comovement of Stock Returns
| Author: | Robin Greenwood |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2005 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
This paper develops cross-sectional predictions from a model in which the excess comovement of stock returns comes from correlated demand shocks. The model is tested on 298 Nikkei index stocks and 1,458 non-index stocks for the years 1993 through 2003. The study finds that controlling for index membership, index overweighting is a significant determinant of the comovement of returns with index returns.
