The variance risk premium, defined as the difference between the actual and risk-neutral expectations of the forward aggregate market variation, helps predict future market returns. Relying on a new essentially model-free estimation procedure, we show that much of this predictability may be attributed to time variation in the part of the variance risk premium associated with the special compensation demanded by investors for bearing jump tail risk, consistent with the idea that market fears play an important role in understanding the return predictability.
Liquidity production is a central function of banks. High leverage is optimal for banks in a model that has just enough frictions for banks to have a meaningful role in liquid-claim production. The model has a market premium for (socially valuable) safe/liquid debt, but no taxes or other traditional motives to lever up. Because only safe debt commands a liquidity premium, banks with risky assets use risk management to maximize their capacity to include such debt in the capital structure. The model can explain why banks have higher leverage than most operating firms, why risk management is central to banks׳ operating policies, why bank leverage increased over the last 150 years or so, and why leverage limits for regulated banks impede their ability to compete with unregulated shadow banks.
We present a theory in which the key driver of short-term debt issued by the financial sector is the portfolio demand for safe and liquid assets by the nonfinancial sector. This demand drives a premium on safe and liquid assets that the financial sector exploits by owning risky and illiquid assets and writing safe and liquid claims against them. The central prediction of the theory is that safe and liquid government debt should crowd out financial sector lending financed by short-term debt. We verify this prediction with US data from 1875 to 2014. We take a series of approaches to rule out standard crowding out via real interest rates and to address potential endogeneity concerns.
Market-wide attention-grabbing events — record levels for the Dow and front-page articles about the stock market — predict the trading behavior of investors and, in turn, market returns. Both aggregate and household-level data reveal that high market-wide attention events lead investors to sell their stock holdings dramatically when the level of the stock market is high. Such aggressive selling has a negative impact on market prices, reducing market returns by 19 basis points on days following attention-grabbing events.
Ties between similar partners in economic and financial networks are often attributed to concerns about agency costs. In this paper, we distinguish the underlying motives for tie formation between sets of potential partners in the network, thus informing the relative importance of agency cost and resource accumulation in tie formation across firms. We develop a robust and generalizable methodology that allows for the inference of similarity and/or cumulative advantage motives in the potential presence of resource trading. We estimate the model using venture capital (VC) co-investment networks, employing factor analysis to characterize orthogonal, interpretable resources for VC firms. In the VC setting, value-added resources other than capital appear to be exchanged for capital, but not for one another. We find little evidence for similarity motives as the primary driver of matching, suggesting that concerns over agency conflicts in partnering are dominated by the desire to accumulate higher levels of certain resources.
In a model with bankruptcy costs and segmented deposit and equity markets, we endogenize the cost of equity and deposit finance for banks. Despite risk neutrality, equity capital earns a higher expected return than direct investment in risky assets. Banks hold positive capital to reduce bankruptcy costs, but there is a role for capital regulation when deposits are insured. Banks could no longer use capital when they lend to firms instead of investing directly in risky assets. This depends on whether the firms are public and compete with banks for equity capital or are private with exogenous amounts of capital.
Statistical default models, widely used to assess default risk, fail to account for a change in the relations between different variables resulting from an underlying change in agent behavior. We demonstrate this phenomenon using data on securitized subprime mortgages issued in the period 1997–2006. As the level of securitization increases, lenders have an incentive to originate loans that rate high based on characteristics that are reported to investors, even if other unreported variables imply a lower borrower quality. Consistent with this behavior, we find that over time lenders set interest rates only on the basis of variables that are reported to investors, ignoring other credit-relevant information. As a result, among borrowers with similar reported characteristics, over time the set that receives loans becomes worse along the unreported information dimension. This change in lender behavior alters the data generating process by transforming the mapping from observables to loan defaults. To illustrate this effect, we show that the interest rate on a loan becomes a worse predictor of default as securitization increases. Moreover, a statistical default model estimated in a low securitization period breaks down in a high securitization period in a systematic manner: it underpredicts defaults among borrowers for whom soft information is more valuable. Regulations that rely on such models to assess default risk could, therefore, be undermined by the actions of market participants.
We show that an executive is optimistic about her company׳s prospects if and only if she retains some of the shares received whenever she exercises company stock options. Empirically, an indicator of optimism based on this idea matches the expected relations between optimism and corporate decision-making better than commonly used indicators based on the timing of option exercise. This makes sense, as our model of an executive׳s optimal option exercise and portfolio choice demonstrates that the timing of option exercise depends just as much on stock and other executive characteristics as it does on optimism.
This paper examines the relation between the number and type of lenders that participate in corporate loan facilities and the nature of troubled debt restructurings. We find that loans from traditional bank lenders are significantly easier to restructure out of court than loans from institutional lenders. We also find that the existence of a past banking relationship between the borrower and the lead arranger of a syndicated loan adversely affects the ease of restructuring. Finally, we find that reliance on loans that are held in part by collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) is positively related to the likelihood of a prepackaged bankruptcy, consistent with greater holdout problems when loans are held by CLOs. Overall, our findings suggest that the role of banks in the restructuring process is quite different when bank loans are diffusely held or securitized.