Knowledge that Transforms

Market‐wide circuit breakers are trading halts aimed at stabilizing the market during dramatic price declines. Using an intertemporal equilibrium model, we show that a circuit breaker significantly alters market dynamics and affects investor welfare. As the market approaches the circuit breaker, price volatility rises drastically, accelerating the chance of triggering the circuit breaker—the so‐called “magnet effect,” returns exhibit increasing negative skewness, and trading activity spikes up. Our empirical analysis supports the model's predictions. Circuit breakers can affect overall welfare negatively or positively, depending on the relative significance of investors' trading motives for risk sharing versus irrational speculation.

Using detailed account‐level data, this paper explores how financial sophistication affects consumers' spending responses to changes in income. I document that, controlling for liquidity, financially unsophisticated consumers display significant spending responses to predictable decreases in their disposable income. Furthermore, they have lower savings rates, fewer liquid savings, and higher debt‐to‐income ratios, leaving them more exposed to income shocks. Robustness tests, supported by anecdotal survey evidence, indicate that these results are driven by some consumers' lack of financial sophistication and their consequent failure to understand their financial contracts, rather than by random idiosyncratic shocks, rational liquidity management, or optimal inattention.

We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained themselves, and experienced lower real growth. We find that managers were “Darwinist” with respect to international affiliates but “Socialist” in the home country, that internal capital markets transmitted the credit shock more strongly than a nonfinancial shock, and that access to developed credit markets attenuated the real effects. The total real impact of shock transmission through multinationals on foreign economies was large.

We investigate hedge fund firms’ unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk‐adjusted return difference between a firm's reported gross return and its portfolio return inferred from its disclosed long‐equity holdings. Firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 6.36% per annum on a risk‐adjusted basis. UP is negatively associated with a firm's trading costs and positively associated with intraquarter trading in equity positions, derivatives usage, short selling, and confidential holdings. We show that limited investor attention can delay investors’ response to UP and lead to longer lived predictability of fund firm performance.

This paper estimates the effect of news positioning on the speed of price discovery, using exogenous variation in prominent (“front‐page”) positioning of news articles on the Bloomberg terminal. Front‐page articles see 240% higher trading volume and 176% larger absolute excess returns during the first 10 minutes after publication than equally important non‐front‐page articles. Overall, the information in front‐page articles is fully incorporated into prices within an hour of publication. The response to non‐front‐page information of similar importance eventually converges but takes more than two days to be fully reflected in prices.

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market participation, driven primarily by increased fund ownership. Existing investors tilt their portfolios toward funds, thereby obtaining more diversified portfolios and higher Sharpe ratios, and do not increase their trading activity in stocks. Overall, access to high‐speed internet spurs a “democratization of finance,” with individuals making investment decisions that are more in line with the advice from portfolio theory.

Existing research suggests that alternative data are mainly informative about short‐term future outcomes. We show theoretically that the availability of short‐term‐oriented data can induce forecasters to optimally shift their attention from the long term to the short term because it reduces the cost of obtaining short‐term information. Consequently, the informativeness of their long‐term forecasts decreases, even though the informativeness of their short‐term forecasts increases. We test and confirm this prediction by considering how the informativeness of equity analysts' forecasts at various horizons varies over the long run and with their exposure to social media data.

We show that “zombie credit”—subsidized credit to nonviable firms—has a disinflationary effect. By keeping these firms afloat, zombie credit creates excess aggregate supply, thereby putting downward pressure on prices. Granular European data on inflation, firms, and banks confirm this mechanism. Markets affected by a rise in zombie credit experience lower firm entry and exit, capacity utilization, markups, and inflation, as well as a misallocation of capital and labor, which results in lower productivity, investment, and value added. If weakly capitalized banks were recapitalized in 2009, inflation in Europe would have been up to 0.21 percentage points higher post‐2012.

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984 to 2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of news attention allocated to each theme over time. News attention closely tracks a wide range of economic activities and can forecast aggregate stock market returns. A text‐augmented vector autoregression demonstrates the large incremental role of news text in forecasting macroeconomic dynamics. We retrieve the narratives that underlie these improvements in market and business cycle forecasts.

We develop a theory in which financial (and other professional services) firms design career structures to “sell” prestigious jobs to qualified candidates. Firms create less prestigious entry‐level jobs, which serve as currency for employees to pay for the right to compete for the more prestigious jobs. In optimal career structures, entry‐level employees (“associates”) compete for better‐paid and more prestigious positions (“managing directors” or “partners”). The model provides new implications relating job prestige to compensation, employment, competition, and the size of the financial sector.