Knowledge that Transforms

We examine 24 global factor premiums across equity, bond, commodity, and currency markets via replication and out-of-sample evidence between 1800 and 2016. Replication yields ambiguous evidence within a unified testing framework that accounts for p-hacking. Out-of-sample tests reveal strong and robust presence of the large majority of global factor premiums, with limited out-of-sample decay of the premiums. We find global factor premiums to be generally unrelated to market, downside, or macroeconomic risks in the 217 years of data. These results reveal significant global factor premiums that present a challenge to traditional asset pricing theories.

We study a dynamic voluntary disclosure setting where the manager’s information and the firm’s value evolve over time. The manager is not limited in her disclosure opportunities, but disclosure is costly. The results show that the manager discloses even if this leads to a price decrease in the current period. The manager absorbs this price drop in order to increase her option value of withholding disclosure in the future. That is, by disclosing today, the manager can improve her continuation value. The results provide a number of novel empirical predictions regarding asset prices and disclosure patterns over time. These include, among others, that disclosures are negatively correlated in time, and stock return skewness is negatively correlated with lagged returns for firms with low uncertainty over their future profitability, in more competitive industries, and in industries with less informative public news.

We investigate the impact of an exogenous trading glitch at a high-frequency market-making firm on standard measures of stock liquidity (spreads, price impact, turnover, and depth) and institutional trading costs (implementation shortfall and volume-weighted average price slippage). Stocks in which the firm accumulates large long (short) positions increase (decrease) by about 4% during the glitch and become substantially more illiquid. It takes one day for prices and spread-based liquidity measures to revert. Institutional trading costs, however, remain significantly higher for more than one week. Both liquidity measures are also weakly correlated outside the glitch period, suggesting they capture different aspects of liquidity.

We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate firm-specific credit supply shocks for each year. We compute firm-specific measures of exposure to bank lending shocks of customers (upstream propagation) and suppliers (downstream propagation). Our findings suggest that credit supply shocks have sizable direct and downstream propagation effects on employment, investment, and output, especially during the 2008–2009 crisis, but no significant impact on employment during the expansion. We provide evidence that both trade credit extended by suppliers and price adjustments in general equilibrium explain downstream propagation of credit shocks.

We exploit the 2011 EBA Capital exercise, a quasi-natural experiment that required a number of banks to increase their regulatory capital. This experiment makes secured lending for the affected banks more attractive vis-à-vis unsecured lending, because secured loans require less regulatory capital. Using loan-level data covering the universe of bank loans in Portugal, we identify how banks require collateral on new loans when facing higher capital requirements: relative to the control group, treated banks require loans to be collateralized more often after the shock. We find the affected banks partially shield their relationship borrowers. The increased collateralization also has economically relevant real effects. Treated banks reallocate funds towards sectors with greater asset tangibility. Firms and sectors borrowing to a greater degree from treated banks exhibit lower growth and tilt their investments towards tangible assets.

The effective bid-ask spread measured relative to the spread midpoint overstates the true effective bid-ask spread in markets with discrete prices and elastic liquidity demand. The average bias is 13%–18% for S&P 500 stocks in general, depending on the estimator used as benchmark, and up to 97% for low-priced stocks. Cross-sectional bias variation across stocks, trading venues, and investor groups can influence research inference. The use of the midpoint also undermines liquidity timing and trading performance evaluations, and can lead non-sophisticated investors to overpay for liquidity. To overcome these problems, the paper proposes new estimators of the effective bid-ask spread.

We exploit the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large administrative Swedish data set to estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation. A $150,000 windfall gain increases the stock market participation probability by 12 percentage points among prelottery nonparticipants but has no discernible effect on prelottery stock owners. A structural life cycle model significantly overpredicts entry rates even for very high entry costs (up to $31,000). Additional analyses implicate pessimistic beliefs regarding equity returns as a major source of this overprediction and suggest that both recent and early-life return realizations affect beliefs.

We evaluate the connection between corporate characteristics and the reaction of stock returns to COVID-19 cases using data on more than 6,700 firms across 61 economies. The pandemic-induced drop in stock returns was milder among firms with stronger pre-2020 finances (more cash and undrawn credit, less total and short-term debt, and larger profits), less exposure to COVID-19 through global supply chains and customer locations, more corporate social responsibility activities, and less entrenched executives. Furthermore, the stock returns of firms controlled by families (especially through direct holdings and with non-family managers), large corporations, and governments performed better, and those with greater ownership by hedge funds and other asset management companies performed worse. Stock markets positively price small amounts of managerial ownership but negatively price high levels of managerial ownership during the pandemic.