Knowledge that Transforms

Several measures of credit-market booms are known to precede downturns in real economic activity. We offer an early indicator for all known measures of credit booms. Our measure is based on intra-family flow shifts towards high-yield bond mutual funds. It predicts indicators such as growth in financial intermediary balance sheets, increase in shares of high-yield bond issuers, and downturns of various measures of credit spreads. It also directly predicts the business cycle by positively predicting GDP growth and negatively predicting unemployment. Our results provide support for the investor demand-based narrative of credit cycles and can be useful for policymakers.

We analyze the role of loan maturity and collateral eligibility in the transmission of central bank liquidity provisions to banks following a wholesale funding dry-up. We analyze the transmission of the three-year LTRO, which substantially extended the ECB liquidity maturity, in Italy, where banks benefited from a government guarantee program that effectively relaxed the ECB collateral requirements. Combining the national credit register with banks securities holdings, we find that (i) the maturity extension supported banks’ credit supply and (ii) banks used most liquidity to buy domestic government bonds and substitute missing wholesale funding, two possibly unstated goals of the intervention.

We examine whether the concern about insurers selling similar assets due to an overlap in holdings is justified. We measure this overlap using cosine similarity and find that insurers with more similar portfolios have larger subsequent common sales. When faced with a shock to assets or liabilities, exposed insurers with greater portfolio similarity have larger common sales that impact prices. Our portfolio similarity measure can be used by regulators to predict the common selling of any institution that reports security or asset class holdings, making the measure a useful ex ante predictor of divestment behavior in times of market stress.

We analyze how public information on past entrepreneurial failure affects entrepreneurs’ ability to borrow and start new ventures. We exploit a policy shock from 2013 in France, which eliminated a widely used means of public reporting to banks of the identity of entrepreneurs involved in past corporate liquidations. We find that the elimination of this flag increases failed entrepreneurs’ probability of starting a new business by at least 19%. Restarters create companies that have a higher probability of default. The effect of the reform is significantly more pronounced for younger entrepreneurs, in line with banks rationally using information to update beliefs on entrepreneurs’ ability.

We find that the relation between state variables, such as the t-bill rate and term spread, and consumption growth is time-varying. In the cross-section of U.S. stocks, risk premia for exposure to state variables vary over time accordingly. When a state variable predicts consumption strongly relative to its own history, its annualized risk premium increases by 6% (0.4 in Sharpe ratio). This effect implies that risk premia can switch signs and are increasing in the conditional variance of the state variable. These common drivers of time-varying risk premia are consistent with the Intertemporal CAPM. Benchmark factors contain the same conditional expected return effects as state variable risk premia.

Since the global financial crisis, interest rate swap rates, which represent future uncollateralized interbank borrowing, have fallen below maturity-matched Treasury rates. This is surprising, because US Treasuries, which are deemed expensive because of superior liquidity and safety, should produce yields that are lower than those of swap rates. We show, by no-arbitrage, that sovereign default risk explains negative swap spreads even without frictions such as balance sheet constraints, convenience yield, and hedging demand. We support this explanation with an equilibrium model that jointly accounts for macroeconomic fundamentals and the term structures of interest and US credit default swap rates.

We show that at-the-money implied volatility of options on futures of five-year Treasury notes (Treasury “yield implied volatility”) predicts both the growth rate and volatility of gross domestic product, as well as of other macroeconomic variables, like industrial production, consumption, and employment. This predictability is robust to controlling for the term spread, credit spread, stock returns, stock market implied volatility, and several other variables that prior literature showed to predict macroeconomic activity. Our results indicate that Treasury yield implied volatility is a useful forward-looking state variable to characterize risks and opportunities in the macro economy.

This study attests to the important role of US midterm elections in asset pricing, even more important than presidential elections. In months following the midterms, equity premiums, mutual fund flows, and real investment growth rates are significantly higher and Treasury premiums are lower. This is consistent with theoretical models relating higher asset prices to lower future discount rates when post-election political uncertainty decreases. The results are robust to different measures of uncertainty. Also, market betas relate positively to the cross section of average returns in post-midterm months, but the relation is flat in other months.

We provide a psychological explanation for the delayed price response to news about economically linked firms. We show that the return predictability of economically linked firms depends on the nearness to the 52-week high stock price. The interaction between news about economically linked firms and the nearness to the 52-week high can partially explain the underreaction to news about customers, geographic neighbors, industry peers, or foreign industries. We also find that analysts react to news about economically linked firms but the 52-week high effect reduces such reactions, providing direct evidence that the 52-week high affects the belief-updating process.

This paper examines banks’ disclosures and loss recognition in the 2007–2009 financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. We show that, going into the financial crisis, banks’ disclosures about relevant risk exposures were relatively sparse. Such disclosures came later after major concerns about banks’ exposures had arisen in markets. The recognition of loan losses also was slow and delayed relative to prevailing market expectations. Among the possible explanations for this evidence, our analysis indicates that banks’ reporting incentives played a key role, which has important implications for bank supervision and the new expected loss model for loan accounting. We also provide evidence that shielding regulatory capital from accounting losses through prudential filters can dampen banks’ incentives for corrective actions. Overall, our analysis reveals several significant challenges if accounting and financial reporting are to contribute to financial stability.