Many barriers to the international movement of capital across national boundaries have been dismantled over the course of the last 20 years. Financial integration was greatly enhanced by the removal of capital controls on the part of the United States, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands after 1973; the recycling of surpluses to developing countries through the Euromarkets in the 1970's; the removal of capital controls in the United Kingdom and Japan beginning in 1979; financial integration among European Community countries, including France and Italy, in preparation for 1992; recent moves toward financial liberalization in smaller countries in the Pacific; and the steady process of technical and institutional innovation that has proceeded around the world. Some popular tests of international capital mobility, however, appear to show anomalous results. Martin Feldstein and Charles Horioka upset conventional wisdom in 1980 when they concluded that changes in countries' rates of national saving had very large effects on their rates of investment and interpreted this finding as evidence of low capital mobility. The argument

This study examines battles between short sellers and firms. Firms use a variety of methods to impede short selling, including legal threats, investigations, lawsuits, and various technical actions intended to create a short squeeze. These actions create short sale constraints. Consistent with the hypothesis that short sale constraints allow stocks to be overpriced, firms taking anti-shorting actions have in the subsequent year very low abnormal returns of about −2% per month.

Abstract The presence of shadow banks in corporate term loan syndicates adversely affects credit lines’ liquidity provision, despite shadow banks not directly funding credit lines. Within the same syndicated loan deal, shadow banks attract not only riskier borrowers but also fewer banks as co-lenders, both in the term loan and in the credit line. Furthermore, credit lines in deals funded by shadow banks, compared to those without shadow bank participation, are smaller, with shorter maturities, and lower drawdown rates. Overall, our results highlight that syndicated loan deals with a strong presence of shadow banks offer borrowers lower liquidity protection. JEL G21, G22, G23

I provide a unified explanation for shareholder ownership, partnerships, mutuals, government ownership, cooperatives, and vertical and horizontal control: each ownership form constitutes a variation on a single underlying theme, the assignment of ownership to a subset of firm stakeholders. When not every facet of a transaction is contractible and high-powered incentives might divert investment toward the transaction’s contractible facets, to the overall transaction’s possible detriment, optimal organizational ownership allocates the right to set the power of managerial incentives to those stakeholders most affected by the noncontractible facets of the organization’s paramount transaction. Received August 3, 2016; editorial decision August 2, 2017 by Editor Uday Rajan.

We analyze mutual fund industry selectivity—the performance of a fund’s industry allocation relative to the market. We find that industry selection accounts for a full third of fund performance based on two-digit standard industrial classification (SIC) codes, with the remaining attributable to the performance of individual stocks relative to their own industries. More importantly, we find that industry-selection skill drives persistence in relative performance. Unlike stock-selection ability, industry selectivity is not eroded by increasing fund assets. Our results suggest that accounting for a manager’s ability to pick outperforming industries provides information beyond standard performance measures that can enhance a fund investor’s future performance. (JEL G11, G14, G23)

Abstract What distribution best characterizes the time series and cross-section of individual stock returns? To answer this question, we estimate the degree of cross-sectional return skewness relative to a benchmark that nests many models considered in the literature. We find that cross-sectional skewness in monthly returns far exceeds what this benchmark model predicts. However, cross-sectional skewness in long-run returns in the data is substantially below what the model predicts. We show that fat-tailed idiosyncratic events appear to be necessary to explain skewness in the data. (JEL, G10, G11, G12, G13, G14).

We model the interaction between product market competition and internal governance at firms. Competition makes it more difficult to infer a manager’s action given the realized output, thus increasing the cost of inducing effort. An exogenous change in the incentive to shirk increases managerial slack. However, the effects on firm value are ambiguous; in particular, firm value can increase as slack increases. As a result, empirical tests that focus on changes in value may not capture changes in the level of slack. We also provide conditions under which increased competition leads all firms to switch from high to low effort.