Knowledge that Transforms

We study here say-buy/whisper-sell behavior wherein analysts issue optimistic recommendations to attract retail investors while providing more accurate information to fund managers in private, sometimes resulting in fund managers selling the recommended stocks. We test whether fund managers return the favor using their votes for analysts in a Chinese “star analyst” competition. Managers are more likely to vote for analysts who exhibit greater “say-buy/whisper-sell” behavior toward these managers. This suggests that analysts reduce the accuracy of their public recommendations, thereby maintaining the value of their private advice to funds. Our findings help explain several empirical puzzles about analyst public recommendations.

This article studies exchange-traded funds’ (ETFs) price impact in the most ETF-dominated asset classes: volatility (VIX) and commodities. I propose a new way to measure ETF-related price distortions based on the specifics of futures contracts. This allows me to isolate a component in VIX futures prices that is strongly related to the rebalancing of ETFs. I derive a novel decomposition of ETF trading demand into leverage rebalancing, calendar rebalancing, and flow rebalancing, and show that trading against ETFs is risky. Leverage rebalancing has the largest effects on the ETF-related price component. This rebalancing amplifies price changes and exposes ETF counterparties to variance.

Before directly addressing the Response to critique and further elaboration (hereafter “Comment”), written by Patrick Bolton and Marcin Kacperczyk (BK), a few thanks are in order. First, we thank the editor, Alex Edmans, both for providing BK the opportunity to directly comment on our paper as well as giving us the opportunity to respond. We believe that open intellectual debate is vital especially given the topic at hand. Directly facilitating such a conversation in conjunction with the paper’s publication in RF seems to us a good way to showcase various perspectives with equal prominence. Second, we thank BK for taking up the offer to engage with us within this context. We believe direct engagement is the best way to advance scholarly debate on whether and how investors consider carbon emissions information. In what follows, we write our rejoinder to BK’s Comment in the format of a response memo, that is, we reproduce BK’s main points (with some paraphrasing) and respond to each individually in turn. We believe this is the clearest—and, importantly, most parsimonious—way to provide our thoughts.

In this article, we study the transition risk spillover among six major financial markets from 2013 to 2021. The USA is the main transition risk contributor, while Japan and China are the net risk receivers. Risk spillover may change over time and change according to different types of transition risk shocks. It takes around 6 weeks for transition risks to be fairly transmitted. On average, around 50% of local climate shocks to a given financial market originate from other markets. Transmission channels include the transmission of information and the economic connections between countries.

We evaluate the impact of the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act of 2015, which allowed some existing venture-capital-backed startups to monetize their research and development (R&D) tax credits against payroll taxes in the United States. We show that marginally eligible startups increase their demand for R&D workers more than marginally ineligible startups after the PATH Act’s enactment. These effects are stronger among startups that are financially constrained. Marginally eligible startups subsequently recruit workers with more education and experience and file more patents with new inventors. Our findings suggest payroll tax credits are effective in scaling startups and stimulating R&D activities through skilled labor recruitment.

This article shows that contemporaneous and lagged air pollution negatively affects the likelihood of German individual investors to log in and trade in their brokerage accounts, using intraday data and controlling for investor-, weather-, traffic-, and market-specific factors. A 1 SD increase in air pollution leads to a 1.3 percent reduction in the probability of logging in, which is larger than the response to a 1 SD increase in sunshine. We argue that changes in air pollution affect productivity in cognitively demanding tasks, such as trading. Our results are robust to macroeconomic productivity shocks, nonlinearities, or measurement error.

This article proposes a novel perspective on the term structure of market equity yields. Instead of using market dividend futures, we aggregate equity yields of individual firms to estimate the market equity yield curve. This approach allows studying the aggregation effect that shapes the market equity yield curve. During the period from 1990 to 2019, we find a positive aggregation effect: companies with high equity yields were expected to grow at higher rates than companies with low equity yields. Thus, high-yield companies were expected to generate an increasing share of total market dividends when expanding the investment time horizon. Under the assumption of flat firm-risk premia, this implies an upward-sloping term structure of equity risk premia. Together with the concave bond yield curve, the market equity yield curve was upward-sloping.

We investigate the joint optimal risk management and capital structure decisions of banks when they use contingent-convertible (CoCo) futures contracts to hedge financial-sector risk. In spite of banks choosing significantly higher leverage ratios, their default probabilities drop appreciably while their equity values increase, allowing banks to compete more favorably with the shadow-banking system. Banks’ value-maximizing decision to hedge financial-sector risk unintentionally leads to an economy with extremely low aggregate bank default rates across all future states of nature. Thus, CoCo futures offer a powerful microprudential and macroprudential policy tool. That banks choose not to hedge financial-sector risk in practice is consistent with managers internalizing bank bailouts.

We develop a stylized model that generates the following empirical predictions: the less (more) accessible the underlying market is ex ante, the more its liquidity improves (deteriorates) when basket trading becomes available. We empirically test these predictions using corporate bonds before and after the introduction of exchange-traded funds. Consistent with the model’s prediction, liquidity improvement is larger for highly arbitraged, low-volume, and high-yield bonds, and for 144A bonds to which retail investor access is prohibited by law. Our article leads to a more nuanced understanding of the impact of basket security introduction than previous research suggested.

Before regulations were enacted to prevent such practices, information leaked through selective disclosure was incorporated into markets prior to the public release of news. “News days” did not deliver news to markets; now they do. We provide novel evidence of changes in returns and turnover behavior around the enactment of regulations barring selective disclosure practices in the United States and the EU. We conversely document lack of such changes in Australia and Japan, which did not implement similar measures. We conclude that selective disclosure resolves Roll’s R2 puzzle.