Knowledge that Transforms

Stocks tend to earn high or low returns relative to other stocks every year in the same month (Heston and Sadka, 2008). We show these seasonalities are balanced out by seasonal reversals: a stock that has a high expected return relative to other stocks in one month has a low expected return relative to other stocks in the other months. The seasonalities and seasonal reversals add up to zero over the calendar year, which is consistent with seasonalities being driven by temporary mispricing. Seasonal reversals are economically large and statistically highly significant, and they resemble, but are distinct from, long-term reversals.

This paper provides first evidence of negative peer disclosure (NPD), an emerging corporate strategy to publicize adverse news of industry peers on social media. Consistent with NPDs being implicit positive self-disclosures, disclosing firms experience a two-day abnormal return of 1.6–1.7% over the market and industry. Further exploring the benefits and costs of such disclosures, we find that NPD propensity increases with the degree of product market rivalry and technology proximity and disclosing firms outperform nondisclosing peers in the product markets in the year following NPDs. These results rationalize peer disclosure and extend the scope of the literature beyond self-disclosure.

Powerful politicians can interfere with the enforcement of regulations. As such, expected political interference can affect constituents’ behavior. Using rotations of Senate committee chairs to identify variation in political power and expected regulatory relief, we study powerful politicians’ effect on consumer lending to communities protected by fair-lending regulations. We find a 7.5% reduction in credit access to minority neighborhoods in states with new committee chairs. Larger reductions occur in Community Reinvestment Act-eligible neighborhoods and when Senators serve on committees that oversee the enforcement of fair-lending laws. Banks headquartered in powerful Senators’ states are responsible for the reduction in credit access.

When government debt is sluggish, consumption exhibits lower expected growth, more long-run uncertainty, and more long-run downside risk. Simultaneously, the risk premium on the consumption claim (Koijen et al. 2010;Lustig et al. 2013) increases and features more positive (adverse) skewness. We rationalize these findings in an endogenous growth model in which fiscal policy is distortionary, the value of innovation depends on fiscal risk, and the representative agent is sensitive to the resulting distribution of consumption risk. Our model suggests that committing to a rapid reduction of the debt-to-output ratio can enhance the value of innovation, aggregate wealth, and welfare.

Contrary to signaling models’ central predictions, changes in the level of cash flows do not empirically follow changes in dividends. We use the Campbell (1991) decomposition to construct cash-flow and discount-rate news from returns and find the following: (1) both dividend changes and repurchase announcements signal changes in cash-flow volatility (in opposite directions); (2) larger cash-flow volatility changes come with larger announcement returns; and (3) neither discount-rate news, nor the level of cash-flow news, nor total stock return volatility change following dividend changes. We conclude cash-flow news—and not discount-rate news—drive payout policy, and payout policy conveys information about future cash-flow volatility.

We measure the impact of reputation for proxy fighting on investor activism by estimating a dynamic model in which activists engage a sequence of target firms. Our estimation produces an evolving reputation measure for each activist and quantifies its impact on campaign frequency and outcomes. We find that high reputation activists initiate 3.5 times as many campaigns and extract 85% more settlements from targets, and that reputation-building incentives explain 20% of campaign initiations and 19% of proxy fights. Our estimates indicate these reputation effects combine to nearly double the value that activism adds for target shareholders.

We model investing that considers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. In equilibrium, green assets have low expected returns because investors enjoy holding them and because green assets hedge climate risk. Green assets nevertheless outperform when positive shocks hit the ESG factor, which captures shifts in customers’ tastes for green products and investors’ tastes for green holdings. The ESG factor and the market portfolio price assets in a two-factor model. The ESG investment industry is largest when investors’ ESG preferences differ most. Sustainable investing produces positive social impact by making firms greener and by shifting real investment toward green firms.

Industries are economically linked through customer-supplier trade flows. We show that industry shocks propagating along this intersectoral trade network can feed back to the originating industry, causing an “echo”–intermediate-term autocorrelation in returns. Adopting techniques from graph theory, we find that the strength of the trade network feedback is a crucial determinant of the echo effect in industry returns. Returns of the echo strategy implemented within high-feedback strength industries reach 1% monthly. Consistent with limited-information models, the relation between feedback strength and echo profits is strongest in industries with information diffusion frictions, such as low analyst coverage, along the feedback loop. Overall, our results identify intersectoral trade networks as important conduits of industry shocks and provide the first explanation for the echo effect.

We survey 861 finance academics, professionals, and public sector regulators and policy economists about climate finance topics. They identify regulatory risk as the top climate risk to businesses and investors over the next five years, but they view physical risk as the top risk over the next 30 years. By an overwhelming margin, respondents believe that asset prices underestimate climate risks rather than overestimate them. We also tabulate opinions about the expected correlation between growth and climate change, social discount rates appropriate for projects that mitigate the effects of climate change, most influential forces for reducing climate risks, and most important research topics.

I show that the composition of the financial sector has important asset pricing implications beyond the health of the aggregate financial sector. To assess the impact of massive balance sheet adjustments within the intermediary sector during the Great Recession and resolve conflicting asset pricing evidence, I propose a dynamic asset pricing model with heterogeneous intermediaries facing financial frictions. Asset flows between intermediaries are quantitatively important for both the level of and variation in the risk premium. An empirical measure of the composition of the intermediary sector negatively forecasts future excess returns and is priced in the cross-section with a positive price of risk.