Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT Can banks’ reputational concerns improve the quality of opaque, off‐balance sheet securities, such as mortgage‐backed securities? We study this question in a uniquely parsimonious setting. In the 1760s, Dutch banking partnerships securitized West‐Indian plantation mortgages that were risky and opaque. High‐reputation banks originated better mortgages and issued securities that, on average, retained 17.5% more of their value during a market collapse. Reputational effects are attenuated when the managing partners were married into wealth or received a large share of profits in the short term, suggesting that bank reputation only works if bankers are personally exposed to (long‐run) reputational losses.

ABSTRACT Using confidential supervisory risk ratings, we document that banks increase risk after going public compared to a control group of banks that filed to go public but withdrew their filings for plausibly exogenous reasons. The increase in risk improves short‐term performance at the expense of long‐term performance. We argue that the increase in risk stems from pressure to maximize short‐term stock prices and earnings once the bank is publicly traded. After going public, banks owned by investors that place greater value on short‐term performance increase risk more, and those managed by CEOs with more short‐term compensation also increase risk more.

ABSTRACT We assess the long‐term effects of managerial stress on aging and mortality. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we apply neural network–based machine‐learning techniques to CEOs' facial images and show that exposure to industry distress shocks during the Great Recession produces visible signs of aging. We estimate a one‐year increase in “apparent” age. Moreover, using data on CEOs since the mid‐1970s, we estimate a 1.1‐year decrease in life expectancy after an industry distress shock, but a two‐year increase when antitakeover laws insulate CEOs from market discipline. The estimated health costs are significant, both in absolute terms and relative to other health risks.

ABSTRACT This paper documents new stylized facts about returns and cashflow growth rates on stocks and housing over decade‐long holding periods. While cashflow growth rates on the two assets comove positively, their returns comove negatively until the Global Financial Crisis and positively thereafter. These facts present a puzzle for representative‐agent models that imply positive return comovement for assets with similar cashflows. I consider a heterogeneous‐agent model with segmented stock and housing markets connected through credit. News about the aggregate economy generates negative return comovement. Recent shifts such as wealthier homebuyers and institutional housing purchases reduce the importance of credit and segmentation.

ABSTRACT Young firms' contribution to aggregate employment has been underwhelming. We show that a similar trend is not apparent, however, in their contribution to aggregate sales or stock market capitalization, implying that these firms have exhibited a high average‐to‐marginal revenue product of labor. We study the implications of a gradual shift in the average‐to‐marginal revenue product of labor within a model of dynamic firm heterogeneity. We show that this shift provides (i) a unified explanation for several aspects of the decline in dynamism and (ii) a possible explanation for why large declines in young‐firm employment may have only a moderate effect on aggregate output and consumption.

ABSTRACT Farmer, Schmidt, and Timmermann (FST) document time‐variation in market return predictability, identifying “pockets” of significant predictability through kernel regressions. However, our analysis reveals a critical discrepancy between the method outlined by FST and the code actually implemented. Instead of using a one‐sided kernel, which guarantees out‐of‐sample forecasts, they perform in‐sample estimation with a two‐sided kernel. As a result, future information leaks into the forecasting model, undermining its reliability. Rectifying this error qualitatively alters the findings, invalidating most conclusions of the FST study. Thus, attempts to exploit such “pockets”—should they exist—offer little help in forecasting market returns.

ABSTRACT Short‐sale costs eliminate the abnormal returns on asset pricing anomaly portfolios. While many anomalies persist out‐of‐sample before accounting for short‐sale costs, they cannot be exploited with long‐short strategies due to stock borrow fees. Using a comprehensive sample of 162 anomalies, the average long‐short portfolio return is a significant 0.14% per month before short‐sale costs, and the returns are due to the short leg. However, the average is −0.01% once returns are adjusted for borrow fees. Moreover, anomalies are not profitable even before fees if the high‐fee observations, representing 12% of stock dates, are excluded from the analysis.

ABSTRACT This article quantifies the effects of a multiday cyberattack that forced offline a technology service provider (TSP) to the banking sector. The attack impaired customers’ ability to send payments through the TSP, but the business continuity plans of banks and the TSP reduced the effect by more than half. Large banks performed better. Through contagion, banks not directly exposed to the attack experienced a liquidity shortfall, causing them to borrow funds or tap reserves. The ability to send payments after hours helped avoid further contagion. These results highlight the importance of preparedness by the private and official sector for cyberattacks.

ABSTRACT A war‐related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the cross section of expected stock returns. Using a semisupervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section of returns across test assets derived from both traditional and machine learning construction techniques, and spanning 138 anomalies. Our findings are consistent with assets that are good hedges for war risk receiving lower risk premia, or with assets that are more positively sensitive to war prospects being more overvalued. The return premium on the war factor is incremental to standard effects.