Knowledge that Transforms

We analyze the economic and financial impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws in the US. Using data from collective bargaining agreements, we show that there is a decrease in wages for unionized workers after RTW laws. Firms increase investment and employment but reduce financial leverage. Labor-intensive firms experience higher profits and labor-to-asset ratios. Dividends and executive compensation also increase post-RTW. Our results are consistent with a canonical theory of the firm augmented with an exogenous bargaining power of labor and suggest that RTW laws impact corporate policies by decreasing that bargaining power.

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions. Using the framework in Kaplan and Strömberg (2001), we provide detailed information on VCs’ practices in pre-investment screening (sourcing evaluating and selecting investments), in structuring investments, and in post-investment monitoring and advising. In selecting investments, VCs see the management team as somewhat more important than business-related characteristics such as product or technology although there is meaningful cross-sectional variation across company stage and industry. VCs also attribute the ultimate investment success or failure more to the team than to the business. While deal sourcing, deal selection, and post-investment value-added all contribute to value creation, the VCs rate deal selection as the most important of the three. We compare our results to those for chief financial officers (Graham and Harvey, 2001) and private equity investors (Gompers et al., 2016a).

We find a strong link between currency excess returns and the relative strength of the business cycle. Buying currencies of strong economies and selling currencies of weak economies generates high returns both in the cross-section and time series of countries. These returns stem primarily from spot exchange rate predictability, are uncorrelated with common currency investment strategies, and cannot be understood using traditional currency risk factors in either unconditional or conditional asset pricing tests. We also show that a business cycle factor implied by our results is priced in a broad currency cross section.

Do stock prices of publicly listed companies respond to changes in transaction costs? Using the SEC’s pilot program that increased the tick size for approximately 1,200 randomly chosen stocks, we find a stock price decrease between 1.75% and 3.2% for small spread stocks affected by the larger tick size relative to a control group. We find that the increase in the present value of transaction costs accounts for a small percentage of the price decrease. We study channels of price variation due to changes in expected returns: information risk, investor horizon, and liquidity risk. The evidence suggests that trading frictions affect the cost of capital.

I develop an equilibrium model to explain why few mutual fund managers consistently outperform, even though many have strong informational advantages. The key ingredient is that managers obtain investment ideas through idea sharing. Idea sharing improves statistical significance of alpha through increased price informativeness. But it also causes better informed managers to take larger positions, which makes their alpha noisier—although a significant fraction of managers builds strong informational advantages, statistical significance and persistence of alpha concentrate in underperforming funds. I argue that in-house development of ideas cannot explain these facts.

We derive a measure that captures the extent to which common ownership shifts managers’ incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the measure is that it allows for the possibility that not all investors are attentive to whether a manager's actions benefit the investor's overall portfolio. Empirically, we show that potential drivers of common ownership, including mergers in the asset management industry and, under certain circumstances, even indexing, could diminish managerial motives to internalize externalities. Our findings illustrate the importance of accounting for investor inattention when analyzing whether the growth of common ownership affects managerial incentives.

We find that corporate loan contracts frequently concentrate control rights with a subset of lenders. Despite the rise in term loans without financial covenants—so-called covenant-lite loans—borrowing firms’ revolving lines of credit almost always retain traditional financial covenants. This split structure gives revolving lenders the exclusive right and ability to monitor and to renegotiate the financial covenants, and we confirm that loans with split control rights are still subject to the discipline of financial covenants. We provide evidence that split control rights are designed to mitigate bargaining frictions that have arisen with the entry of nonbank lenders and became apparent during the financial crisis.

We explore how large and small banks make funding decisions when system-wide bailouts are possible. We show that bank size, purely on strategic grounds, is a key determinant of banks’ leverage choices, even when bailout policies treat large and small banks symmetrically. Large banks leverage more than small banks because they internalize that their decisions directly affect bailout policies. In equilibrium, this effect is amplified by strategic spillovers to small banks since banks’ leverage choices are strategic complements. Overall, the presence of large banks makes bailouts more likely. The optimal regulation features size-dependent policies that disproportionately restrict large banks’ leverage.

Using multiple measures of attack proximity, we show that CEOs employed at firms located near terrorist attacks earn an average pay increase of 12% after the attack relative to CEOs at firms located far from attacks. CEOs at terrorist attack-proximate firms prefer cash-based compensation increases (e.g., salary and bonus) over equity-based compensation (e.g., options and stocks granted). The effect is causal and it is larger when the bargaining power of the CEO is high. Other executives and workers do not receive a terrorist attack premium.

We examine the value and efficiency of analyst recommendations through the lens of capital market anomalies. We find that analysts do not fully use the information in anomaly signals when making recommendations. Analysts tend to give more favorable consensus recommendations to stocks classified as overvalued and, more important, these stocks subsequently tend to have particularly negative abnormal returns. Analysts whose recommendations are better aligned with anomaly signals are more skilled and elicit stronger recommendation announcement returns. Our findings suggest that analysts’ biased recommendations could be a source of market friction that impedes the efficient correction of mispricing.