Knowledge that Transforms

Endogenous cycles emerge through the two-way interaction between lending standards and production fundamentals. Lax lending standards in booms lead to low interest rates and high output but the deterioration of future loan quality. Low borrower quality in turn precipitates tight standards: the economy enters a recession with high credit spreads and low output but a gradual improvement in the quality of loans. This eventually triggers a shift back to a boom with lax lending, and the cycle continues. The capitalization of expert investors determines the strength of capital reallocation in recessions. Furthermore, although the constrained efficient economy is often cyclical, it features both a static and a dynamic externality in credit supply, hence differing from the decentralized equilibrium.

Do investors reach for yield when interest rates are low and does this behavior affect the housing market? Using the unique setting and data of 18th-century Amsterdam, I show that reach-for-yield behavior of wealthy investors resulted in a large boom and bust in house prices and major changes in rental yields. Exploiting changes in the supply of bonds, I show that investors living off capital income shifted their portfolios towards real estate and other higher-yielding assets when bond yields were low and decreasing. This behavior exacerbated house price volatility and increased housing wealth inequality.

We study insurance and portfolio decisions, two opposite risk retention tradeoffs. Using household level data, we identify the first joint determinants (e.g. subjective expectations, risk attitude) and frictions (e.g. liquidity constraints , financial literacy) in the literature. We also find key differences between the two decisions. Notably, contrary to economic intuition, risky asset holding and insurance coverage both increase with wealth . We show that this apparent puzzle is driven in part by a specific behavioral pattern (the poor invest too conservatively, while the rich over-insure), and can be explained by two factors: regret avoidance and nonperformance risk.

Cross-stock momentum builds on the asymmetry in lead-lag linkages and the difference between long-run and short-run contemporaneous co-movements. Data-driven cross-stock linkages generate a monthly alpha of 1.62% ( t -stat=10.03). The asymmetry distinguishes cross-stock momentum from factor momentum, and industry momentum is not subsumed by factor momentum. Factor momentum profit is mostly due to the high cross-stock links. The data-driven linkages vary faster over time than those in previous studies because short-run co-movements incorporate persistent linkages.

We study the distributional consequences of student debt forgiveness in present value terms, accounting for differences in repayment behavior across the earnings distribution. Full or partial forgiveness is regressive because high earners took larger loans, but also because, for low earners, balances greatly overstate the benefits of debt cancellation. Consequently, forgiveness would benefit the top decile as much as the bottom three deciles combined. Enrolling households who would benefit from income-driven repayment is less expensive and distributes more funds to lower-income households.

Remote work has increased the demand for housing and changed the demand for the location of that housing. Because housing supply is heterogeneous across space and more elastic in the long-run, the effects on rents and populations may differ over time. We use the lens of a spatial housing model with heterogeneous housing supply elasticities to identify the housing and location demand changes from 2020–2022, and show that the same shocks will have different effects in the long run. Even though rents and prices increased significantly in the short-run, we estimate that in the long-run, increased housing demand will increase rents by only 1.8 percentage points, and that changing location demand will decrease rents by 0.3 percentage points, with a more negative impact on cities in which CPI is measured and cities that were initially expensive.

Screening in consumer credit markets is often associated with large fixed costs. We present both theory and evidence that, when lenders use fixed-cost technologies to screen borrowers, increased competition may increase rather than decrease interest rates in subprime consumer credit markets. In more competitive markets, lenders have lower market shares, and thus lower incentives to invest in screening. Thus, when markets are competitive, all lenders face a riskier pool of borrowers, which can lead interest rates to be higher. We provide evidence for the model’s predictions in the auto loan market using administrative credit panel data.

Loan guarantees represent a form of government intervention to support bank lending. However, their use raises concerns as to their effect on bank risk-taking incentives. In a model of financial fragility that incorporates bank capital and a bank incentive problem, we show that loan guarantees reduce depositor runs and improve bank underwriting standards, except for the most poorly capitalized banks. We highlight a novel feedback effect between banks’ underwriting choices and depositors’ run decisions, and show that the effect of loan guarantees on banks’ incentives is different from that of other types of guarantees, such as deposit insurance.

Climate scientists project rising average temperatures and increasing frequency of temperature extremes. We study how extreme temperatures affect corporate profitability across different industries and whether sell-side analysts understand these relationships. We combine granular daily data on temperatures across the continental U.S. with locations of public companies’ establishments and build a panel of quarterly firm-level temperature exposures. Extreme temperatures significantly impact earnings in over 40% of industries , with bi-directional effects that harm some industries while others benefit. Analysts and investors do not immediately react to observable intra-quarter temperature shocks, though earnings forecasts account for temperature effects by quarter-end in many industries.

This paper develops a multi-firm equilibrium model of information acquisition based on differences in firms’ characteristics. The model shows that heightened economic uncertainty amplifies stock price reactions to earnings announcements via increased investor attention, which varies by firm characteristics. Firms with higher systematic risk or more informative announcements attract more attention and exhibit stronger reactions to earnings announcements. Moreover, heightened investor attention caused by high economic uncertainty leads to a steeper CAPM relation and higher betas for announcing firms. Empirical analyses using firm-level attention measures and CAPM tests on high- versus low-attention days support the model’s predictions.