Knowledge that Transforms

Stock exchanges compete for order flow through their fee models. A traditional model pays rebates to liquidity suppliers, and an inverted model pays rebates to liquidity demanders. Using a regulatory intervention to examine the interaction between tick size, restrictions on dark trading, and exchange fees, we show that traders use inverted venues to adjust for suboptimal tick sizes. Increased inverted venue activity improves pricing efficiency and liquidity, especially when the tick size is binding. We show that the sub-tick price improvement offered by inverted venues enhances competition for liquidity provision and increases information impounded into prices through nonmarketable limit orders.

Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell for approximately 7% less than observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach. This discount has grown over time and is driven by sophisticated buyers and communities worried about global warming. Consistent with causal identification of long-horizon SLR costs, we find no relation between SLR exposure and rental rates and a 4% discount among properties not projected to be flooded for almost a century. Our findings contribute to the literature on the pricing of long-run risky cash flows and provide insights for optimal climate change policy.

We examine synergies in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) generated by firms’ comparative advantages in access to bank finance. We find robust evidence that greater access to bank finance increases firms’ attractiveness as acquisition targets. Targets’ comparative advantage in bank finance improves bank credit supply and reduces financing costs for the merged firms. These effects are more pronounced for acquirers with greater frictions in accessing bank loans and acquirers with greater growth opportunities. Overall, this paper reveals that targets, not just acquirers, contribute to financial synergies in M&As.

This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes information diffusion in the stock market. Central brokers gather information by executing informed trades, which is then leaked to their best clients. After large informed trades, other institutional investors are significantly more likely to execute similar trades through the same broker, allowing them to capture returns that are twice as large as their normal trading performance. Also indicative of information leakage, the clients of the broker employed by activist investors to execute their trades buy the same stocks just before the filing of the 13D.

We show that idiosyncratic jumps are a key determinant of mean stock returns from both an ex post and ex ante perspective. Ex post, the entire annual average return of a typical stock accrues on the four days on which its price jumps. Ex ante, idiosyncratic jump risk earns a premium: a value-weighted weekly long-short portfolio that buys (sells) stocks with high (low) predicted jump probabilities earns annualized mean returns of 9.4% and four-factor alphas of 8.1%. This strategy’s returns are larger when there are greater limits to arbitrage. These results are consistent with investor aversion to idiosyncratic jump risk.

We analyze the role of institutional cross-ownership in internalizing corporate governance externalities using granular mutual fund proxy voting data. Exploiting within-proposal and within-institution variation, we show that an institution's holdings in peer firms are positively associated with the likelihood that the institution votes against management on shareholder-sponsored governance proposals. We further find that high aggregate cross-ownership positively predicts management losing a vote. Overall, our results provide evidence that cross-ownership incentivizes institutional investors to play a more active monitoring role, suggesting that institutional cross-ownership serves as a market-based mechanism to alleviate the inefficiency induced by governance externalities.

This paper studies the effects of time-varying Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity) on asset pricing in a Lucas exchange economy. Specifically, it considers a general equilibrium model where an ambiguity-averse agent applies a discount rate that is adjusted not only for the current magnitude of ambiguity but also for the risk associated with its future fluctuations. As such, both the ambiguity level and volatility help to raise the asset premiums and accommodate richer dynamics of asset prices. Based on a novel empirical measure of the ambiguity level, the estimated model can capture the empirical levels of corporate credit spreads and the equity premium while endogenously matching the historical default probability. More importantly, the model-implied credit spread and equity price-dividend ratio perform remarkably in tracking the time variations in their historical counterparts.

This paper explores how affiliation to financial conglomerates affects asset managers’ access to capital, risk taking, and performance. Focusing on a sample of hedge funds, we find that financial conglomerate-affiliated hedge funds (FCAHFs) have lower flow-performance sensitivity than other hedge funds and that this difference is particularly pronounced during financial turmoil. Arguably, thanks to more stable funding, FCAHFs allow their investors to redeem capital more freely and are able to capture price rebounds. Because investors could value these characteristics, our findings provide a rationale for why financial conglomerate affiliation is widespread, although it slightly hampers performance on average.

We use a large housing transaction data set in Singapore to study whether real estate agents use information advantages to buy houses at bargain prices. Agents bought their own houses at prices that are 2.54% lower than comparable houses bought by other buyers. Consistent with information asymmetries, agent buyers have more information advantages in less informative environments, and agent buyers are more likely to buy houses from agent sellers. Agent discounts are from both “cherry picking” and bargaining power, and bargaining power contributes more to the agent discounts. Agents’ advantage consists in their information of available houses and previous purchase prices.