Knowledge that Transforms

Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms’ GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the 10-K. Excluding them from GAAP earnings yields a core earnings measure that distinguishes between the recurring and non-recurring components of net income and forecasts future performance. Analysts and market participants are slow to impound these earnings components’ implications, particularly the amounts disclosed in the footnotes. Trading strategies that exploit non-core earnings produce abnormal returns of 8% per year.

The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for liquidity-constrained students. To explore this possibility, we use administrative data for federal student borrowers linked to tax records and a sharp discontinuity generated by the timing of a student's 24th birthday, which induces a jump in federal support. We estimate a corresponding increase in homeownership, with larger effects among those most financially constrained, and find supplemental evidence of lagged marriage and fertility effects. Analysis of earnings, savings, and heterogeneity favors liquidity over human capital in explaining the results.

Postcrisis regulations apply stricter liquidity rules to both money market funds (MMFs) and banks, requiring MMFs to do more overnight lending and banks to borrow longer-term. MMFs and banks resolve this dilemma by developing a “bundling” strategy across overnight and longer term markets. In particular, MMFs increase longer term funding and charge a lower rate to banks that have recently accommodated MMFs’ overnight depositing needs. Such cross-market reciprocity is stronger between MMFs and foreign banks, which depend on MMFs for dollar funding more than U.S. banks do. MMFs with lower liquidity buffers and higher flow volatility are more likely to engage in bundling.

Technology transformed the trading of financial assets but has been slower to come to corporate bond trading. Combining proprietary data from MarketAxess with regulatory TRACE data, we investigate how electronic request for quote (RFQ) trading affects bond dealers and trading more generally. We demonstrate that electronic trading remains fairly small and segmented, but has wide-ranging effects on transaction costs and execution quality in both electronic and voice trading, and the interdealer market. We identify features particular to bond markets that have and could continue to limit electronic bond trading growth. We provide an intriguing portrait of a market in transition.

A 2006 rule change in the United States mandated that publicly traded firms provide more detailed disclosures about executives’ compensation plans. In response to the new disclosure requirements, Cournot firms with large market shares add revenue-based pay to their CEOs’ pay packages. This change in pay practices coincides with a shift towards more aggressive product market equilibria, characterized by greater production expenditures and lower margins. Jointly, these patterns are consistent with predictions from the theory of “strategic delegation,” and suggest that the new disclosure requirements enhanced the viability of committing through executive incentives. After adopting the new disclosure requirements, many firms appear to restructure their executives’ pay packages as strategic devices designed to make rivals curtail their competitive actions.

Politics may color interpretations of facts, and thus perceptions of risk. We find that a higher share of Trump voters in a county is associated with lower perceptions of risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Controlling for COVID-19 case counts and deaths, as Trump's vote share rises in the local area, individuals search less for information on the virus and its potential economic impacts, and engage in fewer visits to non-essential businesses. Our results suggest that politics and the media may play an important role in determining the formation of risk perceptions, and may therefore affect both economic and health-related reactions to unanticipated health crises.

The average annual inflation-adjusted amount paid out through dividends and repurchases by public industrial firms is more than three times larger from 2000 to 2019 than from 1971 to 1999. We find that an increase in aggregate corporate income accounts for 37% of the increase in aggregate annual payouts, and an increase in the payout rate accounts for 63%. Firms have higher payout rates in the 2000s not only because they are older, larger, and have more free cash flow, but also because they pay out more of their free cash flow. Though firms spend less on capital expenditures in the 2000s than before, capital expenditures decrease similarly for firms with payouts and for firms without.

We study whether carbon emissions affect the cross-section of US stock returns. We find that stocks of firms with higher total carbon dioxide emissions (and changes in emissions) earn higher returns, controlling for size, book-to-market, and other return predictors. We cannot explain this carbon premium through differences in unexpected profitability or other known risk factors. We also find that institutional investors implement exclusionary screening based on direct emission intensity (the ratio of total emissions to sales) in a few salient industries. Overall, our results are consistent with an interpretation that investors are already demanding compensation for their exposure to carbon emission risk.

This paper shows that belief differences have strong effects on asset prices in consumption-based asset-pricing models with long-run risks. Belief heterogeneity leads to time-varying consumption and wealth shares of the agents. This time variation can resolve several asset-pricing puzzles, including the large countercyclical variation of expected risk premia, the volatility of the price-dividend ratio, the predictability of cash flows and returns, and the large predictability of returns in recessions. These findings show that belief differences, a widely observed attribute of investors, significantly improve the explanatory power of long-run risk asset-pricing models.

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager’s short-term task determines current performance, which deteriorates with investment in the firm’s future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances incentives for short- and long-term performance. Investment is distorted upwards (downwards) relative to first-best in firms with high (low) returns to investment. These distortions decrease as good performance relaxes endogenous financial constraints, implying negative (positive) investment-cash flow sensitivities. Our results shed light on how corporate investment policies, liquidity management, and executive compensation structure differ across industries with different returns to intangible investment.