Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how cybercrime impacts victims’ risk-taking and returns. The results from our difference-in-differences analysis of a sample of victim and matched non-victim investors on the Ethereum blockchain are in line with prospect theory and suggests that victims increase their long-term total risk-taking after losing part of their wealth, leading to lower risk-adjusted returns in the post-cybercrime period. Victims’ long-term total risk-taking increases because they increase diversifiable risk due to victims’ post-cybercrime withdrawal from altcoins. At the same time, the reduction in risk-adjusted returns correlates with increased trading activity and churn, due plausibly to managing cybercrime exposure. In the cross-section of Ethereum addresses, we show that the most affluent victims take a systematic approach to restore their pre-cybercrime wealth level, while the least affluent victims turn into gamblers. Finally, a parsimonious forensic model explains a good part of the addresses’ probability of being involved in cybercrime, on both the victim and the cybercriminal side.

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.

This study examines the ability of the linear-rational square-root model to simultaneously capture cross-sectional and time-series dynamics of bond yields and their variances. The preferred model specification comprises five factors, two of which are not spanned by the yield curve, introducing unspanned stochastic volatility (USV). This specification provides a close in-sample fit to yields and yield variances, emphasizing the need for USV. Out-of-sample testing demonstrates low variance forecast errors. The specification provides evidence of USV in conditional yield variance and bond risk premia, linked to macroeconomic uncertainty.

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.

We show that families are an engine of venturing activities: almost 30 percent of corporate venture capital (CVC) deals in the US from 2000 to 2017 originated from family firms. Family firms, primarily those led by family CEOs, orchestrate CVC activities differently than non-family firms: they syndicate more often and with more reputable investors, join larger syndicates, and make more proximate deals (geography- and industry-wise). This approach to corporate venturing maps into performance results: family CVC-backed ventures exhibit a higher likelihood of successful exit. Collectively, our results shed light on the important, and largely unexplored, role of family firms in CVC.

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.

When the debt of firms in distress is dispersed, a restructuring agreement may be difficult to reach because of free riding. We develop a repeated game in which banks come across each other frequently, and can threaten a punishment in case of free riding. As the number of lending banks grows, the chance of meeting again a bank and of being punished for free riding increases, improving the likelihood of cooperation. Looking at Italian firms in distress, we find that the estimated restructuring probability, as well as the probability of a positive outcome of financial distress, increases with the number of banks up to a threshold beyond which coordination problems prevail.

Using quarterly data on macroprudential policy (MaPP) measures and capital flow management measures (CFMs) in 39 economies over 2000–2020, we analyse how domestic credit and cross-border capital flows respond to such measures. We distinguish price- and quantity-based MaPP measures and CFMs, and examine if the level of financial development matters in explaining policy effectiveness. Tightening MaPP measures significantly reduce household credit when the level of financial development is relatively low, and this is driven more by price-based MaPP measures. Also, price- and quantity-based CFMs slow down bank inflows with the former effective at relatively low levels of financial development and the latter at relatively high levels. Finally, we present evidence on leakages associated with quantity-based measures. Tightening quantity-based CFMs increases offshore bond issuance when the level of financial development is relatively low, while tightening quantity-based MaPP measures increase bank and bond inflows when financial development is relatively high.

We find that in the leveraged loan sector, firms borrowing from non-banks have lower profitability following loan originations, compared to firms borrowing from banks, after controlling for observable factors. As non-bank borrowers experience less intense monitoring than bank borrowers, they engage in more risk-taking, which could explain their lower profitability following loan issuance. Using the leveraged lending guidance as a plausibly exogenous shock, which resulted in the migration of borrowers from banks to non-banks, we provide causal evidence corroborating our main results. Overall, our findings suggest that macroprudential policies which exclusively target the traditional banking sector may have negative consequences.