Knowledge that Transforms

We test the relation between ambiguity aversion and five household portfolio choice puzzles: nonparticipation in equities, low allocations to equity, home-bias, own-company stock ownership, and portfolio under-diversification. In a representative US household survey, we measure ambiguity preferences using custom-designed questions based on Ellsberg urns. As theory predicts, ambiguity aversion is negatively associated with stock market participation, the fraction of financial assets in stocks, and foreign stock ownership, but it is positively related to own-company stock ownership. Conditional on stock ownership, ambiguity aversion is related to portfolio under-diversification, and during the financial crisis, ambiguity-averse respondents were more likely to sell stocks.

Many households display inertia in investment management over their life cycles. Our calibrated dynamic life cycle portfolio choice model can account for such an apparently ‘irrational’ outcome, by incorporating the fact that investors must forgo acquiring job-specific skills when they spend time managing their money, and their efficiency in financial decision making varies with age. Resulting inertia patterns mesh well with findings from prior studies and our own empirical results from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We also analyze how people optimally choose between actively managing their assets versus delegating the task to financial advisors. Delegation proves valuable to both the young and the old. Our calibrated model quantifies welfare gains from including investment time and money costs as well as delegation in a life cycle setting.

Laws governing the foreclosure process can have direct consequences for the costs of foreclosure and, therefore could affect lending decisions. We exploit the heterogeneity in judicial requirements across US states to examine their impact on banks’ lending decisions in a sample of urban areas straddling state borders. A key feature of our study is the way it exploits an exogenous cutoff in loan eligibility to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) guarantees, which shift the burden of foreclosure costs onto the GSEs. We find that judicial requirements reduce the supply of credit only for jumbo loans, which are ineligible for GSE guarantees, i.e., in the nonsubsidized segment of the market. Thus, while we find a significant effect on credit supply, the aggregate impact is muted by the indirect cross-subsidy by the GSEs to borrower-friendly states.

Using a survey of 800 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in 22 emerging economies, we show that CEOs' management styles and philosophies vary with the ownership and governance structure of their firms. Founders and CEOs of firms with greater family involvement display a greater stakeholder focus, and feel more accountable to employees and banks than to shareholders. They also have a more hierarchical management approach, and see their role as maintaining the status quo rather than bringing about change. In contrast, CEOs of non-family firms emphasize shareholder-value-maximization. Finally, firm-level variation in ownership is as important in explaining management philosophies as cross-country or industry-level differences.

We use data on signed option volume to study which components of option volume predict stock returns and resolve the seemingly inconsistent results in the literature. We find no evidence that trades related to synthetic short positions in the underlying stocks contain more information than trades related to synthetic long positions. Purchases of calls that open new positions are the strongest predictor of returns, followed by call sales that close out existing purchased call positions. Overall, our results indicate that the role of options in providing embedded leverage is the most important channel why option trading predicts stock returns.

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in accruals. We show that cash-based operating profitability (a measure that excludes accruals) outperforms measures of profitability that include accruals. Further, cash-based operating profitability subsumes accruals in predicting the cross section of average returns. An investor can increase a strategy’s Sharpe ratio more by adding just a cash-based operating profitability factor to the investment opportunity set than by adding both an accruals factor and a profitability factor that includes accruals.

Over a period that includes the 1998 Russian crisis and 2007–2009 financial crisis,banks with overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) were more likely to weaken lending standards and increase leverage than other banksin advance of a crisis,making them more vulnerable to the shock of the crisis.During crisis years, they generally experienced more increases in loan defaults, greater drops in operating and stock return performance, greater increases in expected default probability, and higher likelihood of CEO turnover or failure than other banks.CEO overconfidence thus canexplain the cross-sectional heterogeneity in risk-taking behavior among banks.