Knowledge that Transforms

Since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators and supervisors have been granted increased independence from political bodies. But there is no clear evidence of the benefits of more independence for the stability of the banking sector. In this paper we introduce a new indicator of regulatory and supervisory independence for 98 countries from 1999 to 2019. We combine this index with bank-level data to investigate the relationship between independence and financial stability. We find that greater regulatory and supervisory independence is associated with improved financial stability. We show that these results are robust to alternative measures of financial stability and to a number of tests. Overall, our findings indicate that increasing the independence of regulators and supervisors is beneficial for financial stability.

Using an international sample of 38 countries, we find that firms located in countries experiencing greater socioeconomic damage from extreme climate events have higher implied costs of equity capital. This finding is attributed to heightened operational uncertainty, greater information asymmetry, and intensified agency conflicts that arise in the wake of extreme climate events. The relation is stronger for firms that derive substantial revenue from domestic markets, operate in climate-vulnerable industries, or are closely held by domestic institutional investors. The effect also varies across countries and is concentrated in markets characterized by low transparency or limited integration into the global financial market. While extreme climate events negatively influence firm performance and valuation, they raise corporate awareness of climate risk.

Despite regulatory reforms, Money Market Funds (MMFs) experienced severe stress in March 2020, following large redemptions and dislocations in short-term markets. We provide a model showing the trade-offs between liquidity and capital preservation services offered by MMFs. We show that in a crisis, MMFs cannot provide liquidity and capital preservation to investors at the same time. As a result, investors have an incentive to run pre-emptively. We calibrate our model on data from USD MMFs and find that most funds would have been unable to meet redemptions above 30% mid-March 2020. Unless short-term funding markets are made resilient in times of stress, MMFs will face similar challenges during future liquidity crises.

Using 13F quarterly holdings data of institutional investors, we introduce a novel measure for differences of opinions among investors by analyzing divergence in institutional investors’ trades. We find that increases in institutional trade dispersion predict a significant decline in future abnormal returns. Moreover, we find that this relationship persists after controlling for other proxies of divergence of investor opinions, such as the dispersion in analysts’ earnings forecasts, the change in the number of institutions holding the stock, and the dispersion in institutional investors’ holdings relative to their benchmarks. Consistent with Miller (1977), underperformance of high-dispersion stocks is found to be the strongest among stocks that experienced recent significant price increases, the stocks with the highest mispricing scores, and the stocks that face increases in short-interest positions after the onset of dispersion.

We explore information spillovers and cross-monitoring between the stock and loan markets, focusing on the roles of short sellers and banks. Using Regulation SHO that directly affects short-selling constraints in the stock market but is exogenous to the loan market, we find that only those firms without bank monitors exhibit significant stock price declines upon the announcement of SHO. We also document that while short interest increases following SHO, it increases far less for firms with bank monitors. Using bank and lending relationship characteristics, we find SHO returns increase in the bank's ability and incentive to monitor. Our exploration of equity ownership structure reveals that the presence of block holders and dedicated owners has little to no effect on our results, suggesting that bank monitors complement shareholder monitoring efforts.

This paper examines the drivers of housing market volatility through dynamic search-and-matching models that incorporate auctions. Two versions of the model are developed: one in which buyers visit homes randomly and another where search is directed by seller reserve prices. The analysis demonstrates that granular shocks and microstructure frictions—arising from the interaction of idiosyncratic and infrequent transactions, search frictions, and auctions-based pricing—generate persistent volatility, even in large markets such as Los Angeles. The paper also identifies systematic weekly patterns in housing activity, which account for up to 60% of monthly variation in sales and listings due to calendar composition. Recognizing and filtering out these predictable fluctuations ensures that the model targets economically meaningful sources of volatility. Together, granular shocks, microstructure frictions, and weekly patterns explain 70%–80% of sales and listings volatility, with the remainder driven by exogenous shocks. These findings underscore the importance of auctions, granular shocks, microstructure frictions, and weekly patterns in understanding housing market dynamics.

Beggar-thy-neighbour in macroprudential policy? This paper studies the impact of macroprudential policies – specifically OSII buffers – on banking groups and their cross-border operations. Using granular data from three confidential databases, we present the first evidence on how banking groups respond to changes in capital requirements. Our findings reveal that: (i) consolidated parent banks constrained by OSII buffers cut back on debt and equity holdings in their foreign subsidiaries, altering global financial structures; (ii) subsidiaries with reduced funding and equity from their parent show a notable decline in lending to non-financial corporations; and (iii) overall, cross-border subsidiaries of OSII-constrained banks exhibit reduced lending and risk-taking towards non-financial corporations, hinting at a role of these subsidiaries in propping up the group’s consolidated capital buffers. While higher capital buffers enhance financial stability by curbing excessive risk-taking, they also constrain the funding and lending capacities of foreign subsidiaries, disrupting local credit markets and creating a “beggar-thy-neighbour” problem. Policymakers need to balance these impacts with the benefits of financial integration.

This study investigates the relationships between currency portfolios and market conditions. We incorporate information on cross-sectional foreign exchange (FX) volatility and ambiguity to determine FX market regimes. Unlike previous studies, we find that high FX volatility leads to higher currency carry returns only when FX ambiguity is high, suggesting that investors avoid making trading decisions during these periods. As a result, the unwinding of currency carry trades, which is usually associated with high FX volatility and declining in carry trade returns, does not occur. We also observe that this pattern does not emerge in other currency portfolios.

The market for passive ETFs and passive ETF benchmarks has exploded. Passive ETF sponsors get index benchmarks mainly from brand name index providers such as S&P and Russell. We show how benchmark and index provider characteristics are relevant for sponsors and different investor types. ETF benchmarks from large index providers attract more capital. Institutional flows exhibit a strong preference for brand name benchmarks, but do-it-yourself retail investor flows do not. ETFs that change benchmarks reduce their tracking error and have 7% higher flows in the subsequent three months, again driven by institutional flows.

This study examines the role of non-severe depression as a psychological anchor against overoptimism. Using earnings forecasts from Estimize, we find that an increase in the proportion of the U.S. population with depression is associated with improved forecast accuracy among users. This effect is concentrated among forecasts that are optimistic and analysts who take longer time to issue forecasts, highlighting reduced optimism and slow information processing as economic mechanisms that explain our results. We also show that this effect is distinct from the influence of temporary seasonal depression or other sentiment measures on decision-making. Overall, our research establishes a link between depression and crowdsourced financial evaluations