The willingness of banks to provide funding for real estate purchases depends on the creditworthiness of borrowers. Besides other factors, this creditworthiness depends on the development of real estate prices. Real estate prices, in turn, depend on the demand for homes which is influenced by the supply of mortgages. I develop a theoretical model which explains this circular relationship. I show how different kinds of expectation formations can lead to fluctuations in real estate prices. Furthermore, I show that banks make above-average profits in the upswing phase of the real estate cycle but suffer high losses when the market turns.

We use a novel data set to study return predictability in debt markets. The data are collected from J.P. Morgan’s periodic surveys on its clients’ outlook for changes in US Treasury yields and corporate credit spreads. We document that simple signals constructed from such surveys predict excess returns on debt portfolios formed on the basis of duration (2-years minus zero) or credit quality (BBB minus AAA). A linear trading strategy placing equal weight on Treasury and Credit signals has an annualized Information Ratio equal to 1.18, before transaction costs. We also show that predictability is likely to stem from private information possessed by survey respondents rather than from risk premia.

This paper investigates the dynamics of individuals’ investments leading up to their decision to make the first investment abroad. We show that investors first invest in domestic securities and only some time later they invest abroad in foreign securities. We also show that investors who trade more often in the domestic market start to invest abroad earlier. Our findings suggest that the experience investors acquire while they trade in the domestic market is a key reason why active investors enter the foreign market earlier. A reason is that highly educated investors as well as investors with more financial knowledge, arguably those for whom learning by trading is the least important, do not need to trade as much in the domestic market before they start investing in foreign securities. Another reason is that investors who start investing in foreign securities are able to improve on their performance afterwards. This improvement in performance constitutes further evidence that the home country bias is costly.

We examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the cost of equity capital for a large sample of US firms. Using several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante cost of equity, we find that firms with better CSR scores exhibit cheaper equity financing. In particular, our findings suggest that investment in improving responsible employee relations, environmental policies, and product strategies contributes substantially to reducing firms’ cost of equity. Our results also show that participation in two “sin” industries, namely, tobacco and nuclear power, increases firms’ cost of equity. These findings support arguments in the literature that firms with socially responsible practices have higher valuation and lower risk.