Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates how historically intensive irrigation systems influenced enduring institutional and cultural traits that constrain firms’ access to finance. Combining geo-climatic measures of irrigation potential with firm-level data from 174 ethnic regions across 146 countries, we find that historically irrigated societies are characterised by weaker property rights, lower trust in financial institutions, and greater reliance on internal financing. Firms in these regions report more severe financial obstacles and higher rejection rates from banks. Implementing a spatial regression discontinuity design around the Lower Rhine and using irrigation potential as an instrument, we provide evidence consistent with a long-term influence of historical irrigation on modern credit frictions. The effects are most evident among privately owned domestic firms, unaffiliated firms, and those with higher female ownership. These findings indicate that ancient irrigation infrastructure is associated with persistent imprints on contemporary financial markets.

We introduce a novel measure for investors' Degree of Rejoicing and Regret (DRR) and test its power to explain cross-sectional stock returns. Consistent with investors demanding compensation for anticipated regret, a portfolio of low-DRR stocks outperforms that of high-DRR stocks by 16.45% annually in the U.S. market. This DRR effect is present globally across 44 markets and is stronger in countries characterized by higher individualism, greater uncertainty avoidance, and weaker investor protection. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of rejoicing, a previously underemphasized component of regret theory, and demonstrates that our DRR measure subsumes the pricing power of existing regret-only proxies.

We study the production effects of one of the largest bank branch expansion programs in history, implemented by the government of India during the 1980s. Combining policy-driven variation with newly-digitized data on bank lending and crop prices at the district-year level, we do not find evidence for a significant shift in agricultural output and inputs on average. Greater bank presence does promote resilience to climate risk, however, by attenuating the effect of lagged rainfall shocks on output. This effect operates via changes in the incidence of cropping during the dry winter season, which makes use of costly irrigation resources.

This research investigates the influence of methodological choices in portfolio sorts on the size of the carbon premium. By analyzing more than 100,000 portfolio construction paths, we find that differences in the construction of brown-minus-green portfolios create a substantial non-standard error. From 2009 to 2022, the mean carbon premium is −0.16% per month, with a non-standard error of 0.26%. Methodological choices regarding the carbon transition risk proxy, the portfolio weighting scheme, and double sorting induce the largest variation, while controlling for common risk factors reduces it. Estimates of the carbon premium from firm-level regressions are similarly sensitive to methodological choices. Finally, we show that carbon allowance prices are related to the level of the carbon premium, whereas unexpected climate change concerns help explain periods of lower methodological uncertainty.