Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(118,869)
- Faculty Publications (116)
- March 2006
- Case
Wells Fargo Convertible Bonds
By: Malcolm P. Baker and Elizabeth Kind
Howard Atkins, the chief financial officer of Wells Fargo, is considering issuing $3 billion in convertible debt. With an investment-grade credit rating, Wells Fargo is not the typical issuer of convertible securities, but the market conditions in 2003 are unusual.... View Details
- February 2006 (Revised August 2006)
- Case
Auctioning Morningstar
By: Malcolm P. Baker and James Quinn
Morningstar, a publisher of data and ratings for mutual fund investors, is considering an auction-based approach to the company's upcoming IPO, with management weighing the risks and benefits of the auction approach vs. a traditional underwritten offering. View Details
- February 2006 (Revised August 2006)
- Case
Investment Banking at Thomas Weisel Partners
By: Malcolm P. Baker and Lauren Barley
Thomas Weisel Partners (TWP), a San Francisco-based bank focusing on emerging growth companies, is considering its strategy in the context of regulatory, competitive, and legal changes. Blake Jorgensen, the chief operating officer and co-director of investment banking,... View Details
- December 2005 (Revised November 2006)
- Case
Corning, 2002
By: Malcolm P. Baker and James Quinn
Corning, with large investments in fiber optic technology, was hit particularly hard by the collapse of the telecommunications industry in 2001. With over $4 billion in debt, the firm's survival appears to rest on raising additional equity capital. The protagonist is... View Details
- November 2005 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
The MCI Takeover Battle: Verizon versus Qwest
By: Malcolm P. Baker and James Quinn
MCI's board of directors is considering competing bids from Verizon and Qwest. Qwest, a smaller company with a weaker balance sheet, is offering almost a billion dollars more. But Verizon, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, has a history of... View Details
- April 2005 (Revised August 2011)
- Case
Berkshire Partners: Bidding for Carter's
By: Malcolm P. Baker and James Quinn
A five-member team from Berkshire Partners must recommend a final bid and financial structure for a leveraged buyout of William Carter Co., a leading producer of children's apparel. Investorcorp, a global investment group, has put the company up for auction. Goldman... View Details
- 2005
- Other Unpublished Work
Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance
By: Malcolm Baker, Joshua Coval and Jeremy Stein
We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to... View Details
- 2005
- Working Paper
Investor Sentiment and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We examine how investor sentiment affects the cross-section of stock returns. Theory predicts that a broad wave of sentiment will disproportionately affect stocks whose valuations are highly subjective and are difficult to arbitrage. We test this prediction by studying... View Details
- March 2005 (Revised August 2006)
- Case
Siebel Systems: The Role of the CFO
By: Malcolm P. Baker and Lauren Barley
Mike Lawrie, the newly appointed CEO of Siebel Systems, considers a combination of growth and spending cuts to turn around the struggling software company. Focuses on the role of the chief financial officer, Ken Goldman, in corporate governance and compliance under... View Details
- 2005
- Working Paper
Can Mutual Fund Managers Pick Stocks? Evidence from Their Trades Prior to Earnings Announcements
By: Malcolm Baker, Lubomir Litov, Jessica Wachter and Jeffrey Wurgler
We consider measures of stock-picking skill of mutual fund managers based on the earnings announcement returns of the stocks that they hold and trade. Relative to standard approaches, this approach focuses on an especially informative subset of the returns data,... View Details
- 2005
- Working Paper
Pseudo Market Timing and Predictive Regressions
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Jeffrey Wurgler
A number of studies claim that aggregate managerial decision variables, such as aggregate equity issuance, have power to predict stock or bond market returns. Recent research argues that these results may be driven by an aggregate time-series version of Schultz's... View Details
- August 2004
- Article
Appearing and Disappearing Dividends: The Link to Catering Incentives
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We document a close link between fluctuations in the propensity to pay dividends and catering incentives. First, we use the methodology of Fama and French (J. Finan. Econ. (2001)) to identify a total of four distinct trends in the propensity to pay dividends... View Details
- June 2004
- Article
A Catering Theory of Dividends
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We propose that the decision to pay dividends is driven by prevailing investor demand for dividend payers. Managers cater to investors by paying dividends when investors put a stock price premium on payers, and by not paying when investors prefer nonpayers. To test... View Details
- June 2004
- Article
Market Liquidity as a Sentiment Indicator
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeremy Stein
We build a model that helps to explain why increases in liquidity-such as lower bid-ask spreads, a lower price impact of trade, or higher turnover-predict lower subsequent returns in both firm-level and aggregate data. The model features a class of irrational... View Details
- February 2004 (Revised February 2004)
- Supplement
Dividend Policy at Linear Technology
By: Malcolm P. Baker
Spreadsheet to (9-204-066). Download only. View Details
- November 2003
- Article
The Maturity of Debt Issues and Predictable Variation in Bond Returns
By: Malcolm Baker, Robin Greenwood and Jeffrey Wurgler
The maturity of new debt issues predicts excess bond returns. When the share of long-term debt issues in total debt issues is high, future excess bond returns are low. This predictive power comes in two parts. First, inflation, the real short-term rate, and the term... View Details
- October 2003 (Revised February 2004)
- Case
Dividend Policy at Linear Technology
By: Malcolm P. Baker and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld
In 1992, Linear Technology, a designer and manufacturer of analog semiconductors, initiated a dividend. The firm increased its dividend by approximately $0.01 per share each year thereafter. In fiscal year 2002, Linear experienced its first significant drop in sales... View Details
- October 2003
- Teaching Note
Dividend Policy at Linear Technology (TN)
By: Malcolm P. Baker
Teaching Note to (9-204-066). View Details
Keywords: Semiconductor Industry
- October 2003
- Article
The Determinants of Board Structure at the Initial Public Offering
By: Malcolm Baker and Paul Gompers
This paper describes board size and composition and investigates the role of venture capital in a sample of 1,116 firms' initial public offerings. First, firms backed by venture capital have fewer insider and instrumental directors and more independent... View Details
- September 2003 (Revised January 2004)
- Case
Giant Cinema
The owner of Giant Cinema must decide whether to invest in a digital projector, a new technology for screening films, or purchase a traditional projector. The impact of the new technology is uncertain, and the case describes probabilities for different outcomes that... View Details