Knowledge that Transforms

Conventional linear benchmarked contracts tend to cause excessive pegging to the benchmark and thus price distortion of stocks in the benchmark. This paper studies the optimal delegation contract when there is principal-agent friction. Specifically, it explores the impacts of incorporating the risk of invested portfolio in the contract on optimal strategies of the principal and the agent as well as on equilibrium asset prices. When agency friction is severe, the optimal contract provides rewards for portfolio risk to improve risk sharing and grants compensation for index return to propel the agent to deviate from pegging to index. In equilibrium, the principal conducts index investment while the agent invests only in individual risky assets, and price distortion caused by agency friction is mitigated.

We analyze the impact of easing borrower-based measures on residential mortgage credit and borrower characteristics in the Czech Republic in early 2020. This easing included a relaxation of the LTV limit and the abolition of the DTI and DSTI limits. Our findings indicate that affected households increased borrowing, purchased more expensive houses, and accepted lower collateral values. Borrowers' debt service burdens rose but were offset by income growth. We find that: (i) LTV-constrained borrowers exhibited cash-retention behavior, while DTI- and DSTI-constrained borrowers aligned with the financial accelerator motive; (ii) LTV relaxation had a greater effect in poorer counties, while the abolition of DTI and DSTI limits affected richer regions; (iii) younger borrowers were more impacted by LTV and DTI easing, whereas DSTI easing influenced older borrowers; and (iv) LTV relaxation primarily affected first-time borrowers, while the abolition of DTI and DSTI limits impacted repeat borrowers, who obtained larger mortgages and purchased more expensive properties.

Using a unique proprietary dataset of daily mutual fund trading records and the COVID-19 pandemic-triggered lockdown in Wuhan (China) as a natural experiment, we find that individual mutual fund investors in Wuhan significantly reduced their daily trading frequency, total investment of their portfolios, and risk level of their invested funds during the lockdown period as compared to investors in other cities. The results suggest that the elimination of face-to-face interaction among individual investors during the lockdown reduced their information sharing, which led to more conservatism in their financial trading. We rule out alternative explanations of salience bias due to limited investor attention and temporary changes in personal circumstances such as depression and/or income reduction, during the lockdown period. Finally, consistent with the theory of naïve investor trading, we also find that investors received higher trading returns during the lockdown as they reduced trading aggressively in the absence of face-to-face interactions.

In a theoretical context where innovators borrow loans or settle for state-owned enterprise (SOE) sponsorship for their projects, we examine the effects of banking prudential regulations and their interaction with corporate leverage on the patenting partnership choice in China using a unique matched patent-firm-bank loan dataset for 15,623 observations in the 2013–17 period. We use a unique instrumental variable (IV) strategy to identify idiosyncratic bank prudential reform shocks associated with the post-2012 Basel III regulation and find prudential metrics (corporate leverage) of the financiers (firms) to positively (negatively) influence SOE patenting partnership choice, though prudential regulation mitigates the latter. Prudential reforms therefore come at a cost of further SOE dominance. However, conditional on an innovation project being SOE sponsored, we find positive spillover effect from the SOE’s employment mandate to loan productivity. Our results are robust across different IV strategies, alternative measures, sub-sample and mechanism analyses.

Does pledging movables as collateral alter corporate borrowing? To answer this question, we study the effect of collateral law reforms on syndicated bank loans granted across nine European countries that facilitated pledging movables between 1995 and 2019, comparing them to 19 countries that did not. We differentiate firms in sectors of higher versus lower asset movability to strengthen the identification. We find that although the reforms have enabled firms in movable-intensive sectors to issue more secured loans, the average cost of the loans and the number of covenants have also increased. Channel tests suggest that banks may demand more to compensate for the potential wealth redistribution induced by newly issued secured credit, or the unique risk involved with using movables as collateral.

We find that the leverage of primary dealers has predictive power in forecasting exchange rates, but that it varies by a novel type of heterogeneity, the dealer’s headquarter jurisdiction, and over time. The leverage of foreign-headquartered dealers in the U.S. drives the predictive power for exchange rates, while it is insignificant for U.S.-headquartered dealers. We propose this heterogeneity can be explained by the relative balance sheet capacity of foreign dealers compared to domestic dealers and how that capacity changes over time with regulation. Furthermore, we document that currency market positions are stronger than cross-border lending as the channel through which leverage affects exchange rates.

VIX futures market makers can hedge their volatility exposure by trading SPX options and futures. We use the daily VIX futures demand by VIX ETP issuers as an estimate of the end-of-day shock to market makers’ net position and find that the demand impacts the SPX futures market in the direction consistent with the VIX futures hedging channel. The VIX ETP demand is a strong predictor of the end-of-day SPX futures return in-sample and out-of-sample. We find evidence of a subsequent reversal, suggesting that VIX futures hedging activities can move the SPX futures market for reasons unrelated to price discovery.

Over the past 15 years, banks around the world have been confronted with substantial costs related to misconduct. In this paper, we examine the impact of provisions for misconduct costs on the behavior of UK banks. We first document that misconduct provisions have a significant and negative effect on capital ratios. Next, we show that banks whose capital is reduced by misconduct provisions decrease non-lending activities but increase lending. Lending growth is driven by profitable higher loan-to-value mortgages, which typically incur a lower capital risk-weighting compared to non-lending activities. These results suggest that when faced with a capital shock due to misconduct provisions, banks restore their capital ratios by shifting their balance sheet towards activities that optimize the ratio of profitability to risk-weighted assets.

This study examines how options trading influences brand development strategies by encouraging managerial risk-taking. We find that firms with higher levels of options trading tend to introduce more new trademarks, which exhibit lower citation rates from subsequent trademarks. These firms favor brand creation over extension, leading to increased brand riskiness, as evidenced by greater trademark diversity. Potential channels for these effects include increased institutional ownership by transient investors and enhanced managerial hedging opportunities. These effects are more pronounced in firms with weaker governance, managers with higher pay-risk sensitivity, younger managerial teams, and intense competition. Additionally, we observe a negative relation between unrelated brand diversification, driven by options trading, and firm value. Our findings support the notion that active options markets incentivize managers to pursue riskier brand strategies.

Can bank competition help to attenuate the prevalence of zombie firms? Motivated by a stylized model, this paper studies the effect of bank competition on the formation of zombie firms in two stages: the formation of distressed firms and distressed firms obtaining zombie lending. Using China's 2009 bank entry deregulation as a quasi-natural experiment, the paper finds that bank competition lowers the probability of the formation of distressed firms, while it increases the probability of distressed firms obtaining zombie lending. Overall, bank competition decreases the formation of zombie firms. In addition, the findings show that a higher ex ante proportion of bad loans and higher probability of bad loan recovery lead to a higher probability of distressed firms receiving zombie lending. Both factors encourage banks to sustain lending to distressed firms to keep them alive and to gamble that those firms may recover in the future.