Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the incentives for mutual fund families to launch ESG funds. Our analyses reveal that introducing a new ESG fund leads to a significant increase in capital inflows to sibling non-ESG funds in the family. This flow spillover accounts for a significant portion of the monetary awards for families to offer ESG funds. We also find that spillover is stronger among retail funds and cannot be attributed to changes in the ESG profiles or abnormal returns of the sibling funds. Further evidence suggests that affect-based judgments, particularly the halo effect, are the key drivers of this spillover effect.

We show that a structural model incorporating firms’ real options and financial leverage decisions can generate forward-looking equity distributions of various shapes, resulting in highly flexible implied volatility surfaces. In contrast, exogenously specified models with stochastic volatility and jumps can only generate smiles and downward-sloping curves. We explain the observed negative relationship between downward sloping implied volatility surfaces and the value of real options: real options contribute positively to equity skewness, and more so the more convex their payoff, which is the case when the real option is “at-the-money” and has the lowest value.

We examine how strengthened anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement affects the U.S. banking sector. Heightened enforcement disproportionately raises compliance costs for small banks, especially in counties more exposed to money laundering. In these areas, small banks contract while large banks expand, increasing standardized, government-supported, and secured lending. While aggregate county-level credit does not decline differentially, local outcomes improve. Small establishments grow, non-tradable employment and wages rise, and real estate prices increase. The evidence is consistent with a reallocation mechanism in which AML enforcement shifts activity toward large banks, potentially improving intermediation quality through changes in the composition of local financial intermediation.

We propose a novel approach to synthesize presumably information-driven insider trading signals for the cross section of stocks. We find that the resulting straightforward composite strategy can often forecast returns in a global sample. This predictability is strongest in equal-weighted portfolios, short holding periods, and insider-buying signals, and it improves further with global diversification. Cross-country analysis reveals that varying insider trading restrictions between countries have limited explanatory power for the performance of the composite strategy. Overall, the results are consistent with a short-term informational advantage of insiders, which might be due to the skillful interpretation of non-private news.

We examine how domestic product market competition shapes firms’ foreign market expansion. Using a panel of U.S. public firms from 1997 to 2017 and text-based measures of output offshoring, we show that stronger domestic competition increases foreign sales activity. To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit the competitive effects of policy-induced variation from staggered rejections of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine. Further tests indicate that these labor mobility shocks that intensify competitive pressure spur foreign expansion primarily among firms with stronger intangible and organizational capabilities and higher profitability. The findings suggest that domestic competition is an important driver of foreign market expansion.

We measure flow diversification in mutual funds using the cross-sectional correlation of daily flows across investor clienteles. Greater flow diversification is associated with lower future flow volatility, smaller subsequent outflows, and lower cash holdings. We decompose flow correlation into predictable and unexpected components. Unexpectedly low flow correlation is associated with higher post-outflow fund returns, mitigating outflow-induced externalities on incumbent shareholders. Flow diversification also dampens the higher flow-performance sensitivity of illiquid funds, partially offsetting strategic complementarities that can generate fragility.

We find that the effect of political connections on tax planning depends on firms’ financial conditions. After increased political connections, financially unconstrained firms increase tax planning and spending on tax services, as documented in prior studies, whereas constrained firms decrease tax planning and spending on tax services. Moreover, decreases in tax planning are only present for constrained firms that obtain new bank loans and public debt and when the connected politicians serve on banking-related committees. Our results suggest that by facilitating access to external financing, political connections reduce financially constrained firms’ use of tax planning as an internal financing tool.

We examine whether and how firms use connected social media outlets to counteract negative coverage in traditional media. Employing a sample of Chinese listed firms with ties to social media outlets, we find that connected outlets portray firms more favorably than unconnected ones. Following unfavorable coverage in traditional media, connected outlets shift attention toward long-term prospects and promote favorable narratives, consistent with an optimism-shifting mechanism. The effect is more pronounced when firms have stronger incentives to stabilize stock prices and when managers face heightened career concerns. Our findings highlight the role of connected social media outlets in shaping corporate narratives.

We examine the effect of private equity buyouts on the environmental performance of U.S. fossil fuel power plants. Output-scaled CO 2 emissions are, on average, 4.2% lower after buyouts, predominantly because of fuel-saving improvements in production efficiency. Emission intensities decline more significantly following buyouts backed by pro-ESG private equity because of not only greater efficiency gains but also enhanced emission control. Our results suggest that while private equity firms are effective at implementing environmentally beneficial operational changes that also increase profitability, they do not have strong incentives to undertake environmentally beneficial changes that are privately costly, except for those with pro-ESG preferences.