Knowledge that Transforms

We decompose cross-sectional differences in the level of price-earnings ratios using professional forecasts. High price-earnings ratios are accounted for by both low expected returns and overly high expected earnings growth. The magnitudes and timing of the comovements between prices, earnings growth, and returns are consistent with gradual learning rather than expectations being highly sensitive to recent realizations. Earnings growth surprises do not translate 1-1 into one-period returns but instead are gradually reflected in returns over time. A structural risk-premium model incorporating constant-gain learning about mean earnings growth replicates our findings and generates realistic dispersion and persistence in price-earnings ratios.

We measure investors’ short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. Across data sources, investors’ forward return expectations are countercyclical, especially when measured as forward risk premiums. This countercyclical variation is, however, excessive, as changes in forward return expectations are too large relative to subsequent realized short-term expectations. The excess variation in forward return expectations can help account for a meaningful share of the stock-price declines during the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis.

I propose a mechanism through which institutional investors’ correlated demand shocks provide a source of market risk in asset pricing. Institutional investors have mandates to beat a similar market index. During periods of strong stock market performance, their incentive to outperform intensifies as more of them fall short of the market index. This incentive induces procyclical risk-taking behavior, generating correlated demand that elevates the market betas and risk premia of exposed stocks. Quasi-experiments using exogenous changes in index membership support a causal interpretation of the mechanism. Elevated betas are associated with a higher perceived cost of capital and reduced firm investment.

Since the 2000s, U.S. public pension funds have actively shifted their risky investments away from public equities and toward alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds—some much more than others. We explore a range of possible explanations for these trends and argue that beliefs about the risk-adjusted return of alternatives have played a central role. Pension beliefs are shaped by investment consultants, peers, and experience in the 1990s. Other demand-side channels related to risk-seeking motives, spending needs, and fund governance have weaker empirical support. We also consider supply-side factors and agency interpretations of the data.

We demonstrate how private equity (PE) promotes nonbank lending by substituting for bank monitoring. Relative to non-PE-backed loans, PE-backed loans exhibit lower bank monitoring, smaller loan shares retained by lead banks, and larger shares held by nonbanks. The substitution is strongest when sponsors have greater incentives to engage with portfolio firms, is not associated with weaker loan performance, and persists during borrower distress. Our findings suggest that PE sponsors’ active engagement—through monitoring and support in distress—reduces banks’ need for monitoring and information production, enabling them to retain less skin in the game and sell loans to nonbanks.

An asset owner designs an asset-backed security and a signal about its value. After experiencing a liquidity shock and privately observing the signal, he sells the security to imperfectly competitive buyers. With flexible information design, the security’s informational sensitivity is a blessing, not a curse. Among double-monotone securities, the issuer prefers to sell the asset in combination with an appropriate signal rather than design more complex securities. Within the class of monotone securities, live-or-die securities are optimal and strictly dominate asset sales. When signals are restricted to be sufficiently informative about the upside, debt and additional-tier-1 debt become optimal.

Central banks increasingly disclose their private information regarding the economy’s current and future state (CBET). Consistent with CBET shifting investors’ collection and pricing of aggregate-level (where managers do not have an information advantage) toward firm-level (where managers do have an information advantage) information, we find that CBET reduces managers’ learning from stock price. The results are (1) pronounced when firms do not provide guidance and when noise trading in firms’ stock is low, and (2) robust to using the 2013–2014 amendments to the Bank of England’s Inflation Report as an exogenous shock. Additional evidence suggests that CBET lowers investment efficiency.

Using résumé data on over 20 million U.S. workers, we find that the flow of employees between a pair of firms sharply drops by about 20% during periods in which the firms share a board director. This relationship is stronger in settings where firms have greater potential gains from limiting worker mobility and is most pronounced for higher-skilled employees. Moreover, we find more connected firms have lower rates of internal promotion and no improvements in employee satisfaction. The evidence is consistent with shared directors serving as a mechanism for labor market coordination.

We introduce a nonlinear covariance shrinkage method for building optimal portfolios. Our universal portfolio shrinkage approximator (UPSA) is built from closed-form basis portfolios, is cheap to implement, and improves on existing shrinkage methods. Rather than uniformly penalizing all principal components of returns or discarding low-variance ones, UPSA instead reweights components to explicitly optimize expected out-of-sample portfolio performance. In empirical applications using a large cross-section of anomaly factors, it delivers robust improvements over alternative shrinkage methods in the literature.

We highlight the role of duration and exchange rate risks on portfolio flows by using a unique and comprehensive database of U.S. investor flows into emerging market government bonds denominated in local currency. Borrowing long-term mitigates rollover risk but amplifies valuation changes that further interact with currency movements. Our analysis highlights the double-edged nature of long-term borrowing and draws attention to market stress dynamics due to strategic complementarities among mutual fund investors.