Knowledge that Transforms

Corporate bond prices are slow to respond to default risk and interest rate shocks, as proxied by firm-level stock returns and Treasury returns, respectively. Furthermore, the underreaction is risk-specific: bonds with better credit quality underreact more to default risk, while those with worse quality underreact more to interest rates. The underreactions imply substantial out-of-sample return predictability, and investors appear to be leaving too much money on the table. The results are consistent with behavioral inattention models in which investors endogenously allocate more attention to payoff-relevant (or salient) risks, and they are not explained by traditional trading friction mechanisms.

We show that firms with longer debt maturities earn risk premia not explained by unconditional factors. Embedding dynamic capital structure choices in an asset-pricing framework where the market price of risk evolves with the business cycle, we find that firms with long-term debt exhibit more countercyclical leverage. The induced covariance between betas and the market price of risk generates a maturity premium similar in size to our empirical estimate of 0.21% per month. We also provide direct evidence for the model mechanism and confirm that the maturity premium is consistent with observed leverage dynamics of long- and short-maturity firms.

We document issuance overpricing of corporate debt securities in China, which is robust across subsamples with different credit ratings, maturities, and issuers. This phenomenon contrasts with underpricing of equity and debt securities in Western countries and reflects China's distinct institutional environment. The average overpricing dropped from 7.44 basis points to 2.41 basis points after the government prohibited underwriters from using rebates in issuances in October 2017. By analyzing overpricing before and after the rebate ban and across different issuers and underwriters, we uncover two channels for underwriters, who compete for future underwriting business, to drive up overpricing: rebates and self-purchases.

Theory predicts that horizontal acquisitions can effectively increase incumbent firms’ market power in concentrated industries with high product similarity. Using a novel measure for industry product similarity, we show that in such industries firms’ propensity to make horizontal acquisitions is greater and that the acquisitions result in more positive announcement returns for the acquirer and rival firms and in a larger premium paid for the target. Also, the deals harm dependent customer and supplier firms and they are more likely to be challenged by antitrust authorities. Overall, by emphasizing the importance of product similarity, our results help explain mixed empirical findings on whether horizontal acquisitions are used to reduce competition intensity.

This paper studies the link between credit availability and student loan repayment using administrative federal student loan data. We demonstrate that policy-driven changes in credit available to high-default institutions explain almost all of the historical time-series variation in defaults. Between 1981 and 1988, eligibility for federal loans was expanded, leading to the entry of institutions with borrowers more likely to default. From 1988 to 1992, credit access was tightened, leading to the exit of many institutions with high default rates. After 1992, the cycle was repeated, with credit access gradually loosened by unwinding many of the pre-1992 reforms.

We study trends and drivers of long-run stock market growth in 17 advanced economies. Between 1870 and the 1980s, stock market capitalization grew in line with GDP. But over subsequent decades, an unprecedented expansion saw market cap to GDP ratios triple and remain persistently high. While most historical stock market growth was driven by issuances, this recent expansion was fueled by rising equity prices. We show that the key driver of this structural break was a profit shift towards listed firms, with listed firm profit shares in both GDP and capital income doubling to reach their highest levels in 146 years.

From 2010 to 2015, a group of traders illegally accessed earnings information before their public release by hacking several newswire services. We use this scheme as a natural experiment to investigate how informed investors select among private signals and how efficiently financial markets incorporate private information contained in trades into prices. We construct a measure of qualitative information using machine learning and find that the hackers traded on both qualitative and quantitative signals. The hackers’ trading caused 15% more of the earnings news to be incorporated in prices before their public release. Liquidity providers responded to the hackers’ trades by widening spreads.

Analogous to Stambaugh (1999), this paper derives the small sample bias of estimators in J-horizon predictive regressions, providing a closed-form solution in terms of the sample size, horizon and persistence of the predictive variable. For large J, the bias is linear in JT with a slope that depends on the predictive variable's persistence. The paper offers a number of other useful results, including (i) important extensions to the original Stambaugh (1999) setting, (ii) closed-form bias formulas for popular alternative long-horizon estimators, (iii) out-of-sample analysis with and without bias adjustments, along with new interpretations of out-of-sample statistics, and (iv) a detailed investigation of the bias of the overlapping estimator's standard error based on the methods of Hansen and Hodrick (1980) and Newey and West (1987). The small sample bias adjustments substantially reduce the magnitude of long-horizon estimates of predictability.

We find strong evidence that when a firm's customer base is more concentrated, the firm's CEO receives more risk-taking incentives in her compensation package. This finding is robust to numerous alternative measures, alternative specifications, alternative subsamples, and different attempts that mitigate endogeneity concerns. Further, the positive effect of customer concentration on CEO risk-taking incentive provision is more prominent when the CEO is more reluctant to take risks, when the firm has more investment opportunities, and when the firm is more prone to the costs of losing large customers. These findings are consistent with the notion that boards provide additional risk-taking incentives to offset the CEO's aversion to the risk of non-diversified revenue streams, thereby preventing excessive managerial conservatism at the expense of value maximization.

We study brokerage platform outages to examine the impact of retail investors on financial markets. We contrast outages at Robinhood, which caters to inexperienced investors, with outages at traditional retail brokers. For stocks with high retail interest, we find that negative shocks to Robinhood investor participation are associated with reduced market order imbalances, increased market liquidity, and lower return volatility, whereas the opposite relations hold following outages at traditional retail brokerages. The findings suggest that herding by inexperienced investors can create inventory risks that harm liquidity in stocks with high retail interest, while other retail trading improves market quality.