Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how an investor collective action organization (ICAO) enhances activism by institutional investors. The ICAO initiated a new form of engagement—private meetings with independent directors to discuss governance proposals. Compared with a single investor acting alone, the ICAO has stronger incentives to engage in activism. Its dollar holdings and voting power are six times larger and predict direct access to the board and the firms it engages. Firms engaged by the ICAO are at least 58% more likely than non-engaged firms to adopt the ICAO’s governance proposals that include adoption of majority voting, say-on-pay, and specific compensation policies. Engaged firms also increase CEO incentive pay. An event study around the announcement of the ICAO’s formation shows a positive impact on value that increases in both dollar holdings and voting power. We conclude that institutional investors improve governance outcomes through collective action.

I find that aggregate asset growth constructed from bottom-up data negatively predicts future market returns both in and out-of-sample and this result is robust across G7 countries. I further show that aggregate asset growth contains information about future market returns not captured by traditional macroeconomic variables and other measures of investment or growth. The forecasting ability of asset growth is strongly correlated with its propensity to predict more optimistic analyst forecasts and subsequent downward revisions, earnings surprise, and systematic errors in investors’ expectations. The time-varying risk premium also appears key in explaining the documented return predictability.

We assemble a new, quarterly panel dataset that links firms’ investment and financing to their employment and wages. In the data, wages and leverage are negatively related, both cross-sectionally and within firms. This pattern contradicts models in which firms insure workers against unemployment risk. We reconcile this fact with a model that integrates factor adjustment frictions and wage bargaining with costly external financing. In the model, the probability of default rises with debt. Because default incurs deadweight costs, the expected surplus over which firms and workers bargain falls, thus depressing wages. We show that raising financing costs reduces employment and wages, in line with recent reduced-form evidence.

We use an event study approach to estimate the burden of the financial regulations associated with Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) designation. On March 30, 2016, the US District Court determined that MetLife’s SIFI designation was arbitrary and capricious because the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) failed to weigh the economic cost of the financial regulation on MetLife against the benefits of increased financial stability. We find significant positive abnormal returns for MetLife and AIG on the date of the ruling. We estimate that the lifting of the SIFI designation created $1.4 billion in corporate wealth for MetLife, suggesting that MetLife would be 3.4% more profitable as a non-SIFI. These gains fall short of the $8 billion stipulated by MetLife in its complaint. We also find significant abnormal returns to SIFI institutions on the day following the US Presidential election.

The article analyses the empirical relationship between bank credit risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area, using a system of simultaneous equations identified through heteroskedasticity. We first confirm a two-way causality between both risks, which amplifies initial credit risk shocks. We also document significant credit risk spillovers between sovereigns and banks in the periphery and the core countries. The article then focuses on the impact of ECB non-standard monetary policy and bank bailout policies. We show that bailouts have reduced both risks. Monetary policy lowered in most but not all cases bank and sovereign risk.

This article uses the 2007–09 financial crisis as a negative liquidity shock on banks in the USA and analyzes its transmission to the real economy. The ex ante heterogeneity in the amount of long-term debt that matured during the crisis is used to measure the variation in banks’ exposure to the liquidity shock. I find that banks transmitted the liquidity shock to the real economy by reducing their loan supply. The reduction was particularly strong for real estate loans. As a result, house prices declined in the MSAs where these banks have branches. Bank capital plays a significant role in the transmission: under-capitalized banks transmitted the liquidity shock, whereas well-capitalized banks’ lending did not show any decline.

Using a unique proprietary account-level trading dataset in China, we investigate how active information acquisition alleviates price-based return comovement, a typical anomaly in stock splits. We find that: 1) individual trading drives the comovement and the trading correlation between split stocks and the low-price portfolio increases significantly after splits; 2) individuals can learn the firm fundamentals through information acquisition, which effectively alleviates their categorized bias; and 3) the role of information acquisition is more significant in environments characterized by greater uncertainty. Our results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures. Taken together, this paper emphasizes the important role of information acquisition in alleviating behavioral bias and improving decision-making.

Many recently proposed, seemingly different factor models are closely related. In spanning tests, the q-factor model largely subsumes the Fama–French five- and six-factor models, and the q5 model subsumes the Stambaugh–Yuan four-factor model. Their “mispricing” factors are sensitive to the construction procedure, and once replicated via the traditional approach, are close to the q-factors, with correlations of 0.8 and 0.84. Finally, consistent with the investment CAPM, valuation theory predicts a positive relation between the expected investment and the expected return.

Recent literature suggests that higher capital requirements for banks might lead to a socially costly crowding out of deposits by equity. This paper shows that additional equity in banks can help to crowd in deposits. Intuitively, as banks have more equity and become safer, the cost of deposit funding may decline; this, in turn, can encourage banks to expand their deposits. However, I also find that, for this effect to occur, capital requirements may have to be stringent enough: When bank capital is low, a small rise in capital requirements can cause banks to substitute equity for deposits. Overall, a non-monotonic relationship between the required amount of equity in banks and their level of deposit funding obtains.

We study how renegotiation frictions impact distressed debt resolution and ex-ante financial contracting. We do so by exploiting an event that exogenously reduced the costs that syndicated lenders incur when renegotiating debt out of court, without affecting in-court restructuring costs (IRS Regulation TD9599). CDS contracts insure creditors against in-court bankruptcy losses and CDS spreads reflect the shadow price of bankruptcy risk. Using a triple-differences approach, we show that CDS spreads fell by record figures on the event’s announcement, with declines concentrated among distressed firms that relied most on syndicated loans. Distressed firms’ loan renegotiation rates more than doubled, as banks agreed to extend loan maturities in exchange for higher interest payments. Those firms’ access to new syndicated loans increased while associated interest markups declined.