Does Firm-specific Information in Stock Prices Guide Capital Allocation?

We show that firms in industries in which firm-specific stock price variation is larger use more external financing and allocate capital with greater precision in the sense that their marginal q ratios are closer to one. Greater precision of stock prices in tracking firm fundamentals should alleviate the information asymmetry problem in outside financing and thus reduces its costs. Also, the greater precision should also improve monitoring and the precision in firm investment decision. Thus, our result is consistent with the view that greater firm-specific stock price variation indicates that stock prices are tracking fundamentals more closely, perhaps because of more intense interest on the part of risk arbitrageurs.