Knowledge that Transforms

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the effects of bank capital requirements. Households’ preferences for liquid assets imply a liquidity premium on deposits. The banking sector supplies deposits and has excessive risk-taking incentives. I show that the scarcity of deposits created by an increased capital requirement can reduce the cost of capital for banks and increase bank lending. A higher capital requirement also increases banks’ monitoring incentives, which improves the efficiency of banks’ activities. Under reasonable parameterizations, the marginal benefit of a higher capital requirement related to this channel significantly exceeds the marginal cost, indicating that US capital requirements have been suboptimally low.

The price of discount rate risk reveals whether increases in equity risk premia represent good or bad news to rational investors. Employing a new empirical methodology, we find that the price is negative, which suggests that discount rates are high during times of high marginal utility of wealth. Our approach relies on using future realized market returns to consistently estimate covariances of asset returns with the market risk premium. Covariances drive observed patterns in a broad cross section of stock and bond expected returns.

Hedge fund activists target firms engaging in empire building and improve their future acquisition and divestiture strategy. Following intervention, activist targets make fewer acquisitions but obtain substantially higher returns by avoiding large and diversifying deals and refraining from acquisitions during merger waves. Activist targets also increase the pace of divestitures and achieve higher divestiture returns than matched non-targets. Activists curtail empire building through the removal of empire building chief executive officers (CEOs), compensation based incentives, and appointment of new board members. Our findings highlight an important channel through which activists improve efficiency and create shareholder value.