We investigate the optimal savings decisions for investors with access to pre-tax (traditional) and post-tax (Roth) versions of tax-advantaged retirement accounts. The model features a progressive tax schedule and uncertainty over future tax rates. Traditional accounts are valuable for hedging retirement account performance and managing current income near tax-bracket cutoffs, whereas Roth accounts allow investors to mitigate uncertainty over future tax schedules. The optimal asset location policy for most households involves diversifying between traditional and Roth vehicles. Contrary to conventional advice, the substantial economic benefits from Roth investments are not limited to investors with low current income.

Households that fail to refinance their mortgage when interest rates decline lose out on substantial savings. Using a random sample of outstanding US mortgages in December 2010, we estimate that approximately 20% of unconstrained households for whom refinancing was optimal had not done so. The median household would save $160/month over the remaining life of the loan, for a total present-discounted value of forgone savings of $11,500, a particularly large consumer financial mistake. To shed light on possible mechanisms, we also provide results from a mail campaign targeted at a sample of homeowners who could benefit from refinancing.

With a year of equity loans by a major lender, we measure the effect of actual short-selling costs and constraints on trading strategies that involve short-selling. We find the loans of initial public offering (IPOs), DotCom, large-cap, growth and low-momentum stocks to be cheap relative to the strategies’ documented profits and that investors who can short only stocks that are cheap and easy to borrow can enjoy at least some of the profits of unconstrained investors. Most IPOs are loaned on their first settlement days and throughout their first months, and the underperformance around lockup expiration is significant even for the IPOs that are cheap and easy to borrow. The effect of short-selling frictions appears strongest in merger arbitrage. Acquirers’ stock is expensive to borrow, especially when the acquirer is small, though the major influence on trading profits is not through expense but availability.

This paper examines policies and procedures put in place by corporations to regulate trading in the stock by the firm's own insiders. Over 92% of our sample companies have their own policies restricting trading by insiders, and 78% have explicit blackout periods during which the company prohibits trading by its insiders. Our data indicate that blackout periods successfully suppress trading, both purchases and sales, by insiders, and that the blackout period is associated with a bid–ask spread that's narrower by about two basis points. Consistent with this effect on the spread, allowed insider trades are modestly more profitable than insider trades made during prohibited blackout periods.

Although firm-initiated clawbacks reduce accounting manipulation, they also induce managers to engage in suboptimal activities (e.g., reduce research and development (R&D) expenses) to achieve earnings targets. To assess the effectiveness of clawback provisions, we examine their impact from debtholders' point of view. We find that banks use more financial covenants and performance pricing provisions in the loan contracts and decrease interest rates after firms initiate clawbacks. Moreover, we also find that loan maturity increases and loan collateral decreases subsequent to clawback adoption. Taken together, our findings indicate that firm-initiated clawback provisions enhance financial reporting quality, thereby reducing the information uncertainty that financing providers face.

We classify asset pricing anomalies into those exacerbating mispricing (build-up anomalies) and those resolving it (resolution anomalies). We estimate the dynamics of price wedges for well-known anomaly portfolios and map them to firm-level mispricings. We find that several prominent anomalies like momentum and profitability further dislocate prices. Multi-factor models designed to eliminate one-month alphas still produce large price wedges. Our estimates yield a novel decomposition of Tobin’s q, revealing that q’s mispricing component has substantial explanatory power for firm investment. Overall, our results suggest that financial intermediaries chasing build-up anomalies negatively affect price efficiency and associated real capital allocation.

Announcements of stock-financed mergers and acquisitions (M&As) may attract short selling of bidder shares by merger arbitrageurs. We hypothesize that bidders with higher short-selling potential include a higher proportion of cash in their M&A payments to mitigate stock price declines resulting from arbitrage short sales. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the ex ante net lending supply of bidder shares has a positive impact on the percentage of cash in public target payments. Further tests, including a placebo analysis of public-to-private deals and an analysis of expected price pressure proxies, corroborate the impact of anticipated arbitrage-related price pressure on payment choice.

Differences in accrued gains and investors’ tax-sensitivity induce variation in a capital gains lock-in effect across mutual funds even for the same stock at the same time. Exploiting this variation, we show this effect influences funds’ governance decisions: higher capital gains decrease the likelihood a fund exits prior to contentious votes and increase the likelihood a fund votes against management. Consistent with tax motivation, these findings are concentrated among funds with tax-sensitive investors. Further, high aggregate capital gains across funds holding a stock predict a higher likelihood management loses a vote and a lower likelihood a contentious vote is proposed.

We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks when they compete with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe “money-like” claims, they go about this in different ways. Traditional banks create money-like claims by holding illiquid fixed-income assets to maturity, and they rely on deposit insurance and costly equity capital to support this strategy. This strategy allows bank depositors to remain “sleepy”: they do not have to pay attention to transient fluctuations in the market value of bank assets. In contrast, shadow banks create money-like claims by giving their investors an early exit option requiring the rapid liquidation of assets. Thus, traditional banks have a stable source of funding, while shadow banks are subject to runs and fire-sale losses. In equilibrium, traditional banks have a comparative advantage at holding fixed-income assets that have only modest fundamental risk but are illiquid and have substantial transitory price volatility, whereas shadow banks tend to hold relatively liquid assets.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of using securities class action lawsuits in monitoring defendant firms by institutional lead plaintiffs from two aspects: (1) immediate litigation outcomes, including the probability of surviving the motion to dismiss and the settlement amount, and (2) subsequent governance improvement such as changes in board independence. Using a large sample of securities lawsuits from 1996 to 2005, we show that institutional investors are more likely to serve as the lead plaintiff for lawsuits with certain characteristics. After controlling for these determinants of having an institutional lead plaintiff, we show that securities class actions with institutional owners as lead plaintiffs are less likely to be dismissed and have larger monetary settlements than securities class actions with individual lead plaintiffs. This effect exists for various types of institutions including public pension funds. We also find that, after the lawsuit filings, defendant firms with institutional lead plaintiffs experience greater improvement in their board independence than defendant firms with individual lead plaintiffs. Our study suggests that securities litigation is an effective disciplining tool for institutional owners.