Knowledge that Transforms

This paper finds that stricter laws regulating third-party debt collection reduce the number of third-party debt collectors, lower the recovery rates on delinquent credit card loans, and lead to a modest decrease in the openings of new revolving lines of credit. Further, stricter third-party debt collection laws are associated with fewer consumer lawsuits against third-party debt collectors but not with a reduction in the overall number of consumer complaints. Overall, stricter third-party debt collection laws appear to restrict access to new revolving credit but have an ambiguous effect on the nonpecuniary costs that the debt collection process imposes on borrowers.

Motivated by McLean and Pontiff (2016), we study the pre- and post-publication return predictability of 241 cross-sectional anomalies in 39 stock markets. We find, based on more than two million anomaly country-months, that the United States is the only country with a reliable post-publication decline in long-short returns. Collectively, our meta-analysis of return predictors suggests that barriers to arbitrage trading can create segmented markets and that anomalies tend to represent mispricing instead of data mining.

This paper examines how housing market distress affects job search. Using data from a leading online job search platform during the Great Recession, we find that job seekers in areas with depressed housing markets apply for fewer jobs that require relocation. With their search constrained geographically, job seekers broaden their search for lower-level positions nearby. These effects are stronger for job seekers with recourse mortgages, which we confirm using a spatial regression discontinuity analysis. Our findings suggest that housing market distress distorts labor market outcomes by impeding households’ ability to move.

We study tradeoffs among active mutual funds’ characteristics. In both our equilibrium model and the data, funds with larger size, lower expense ratio, and higher turnover hold more-liquid portfolios. Portfolio liquidity, a concept introduced here, depends not only on the liquidity of the portfolio’s holdings but also on the portfolio’s diversification. We also confirm other model-predicted tradeoffs. Larger funds are cheaper. Larger and cheaper funds are less active, based on our new measure of activeness. Better-diversified funds hold less-liquid stocks; they are also larger and cheaper, and they trade more. These tradeoffs provide novel evidence of diseconomies of scale in active management.

We examine market making behavior of dealers for 55,988 corporate bonds, many of which trade infrequently. Dealers have a substantially higher propensity to offset trades within the same day rather than committing capital for longer periods for riskier and less actively traded bonds. Dealers’ holding periods do not decline with a bond's prior trading activity and in fact are lowest for some of the least active bonds. As a result, cross-sectional estimates of roundtrip trading costs do not increase as prior trading activity declines. Our results suggest that dealers endogenously adjust their behavior to mitigate inventory risk from trading in illiquid and higher risk securities, balancing search and inventory costs in equilibrium such that observed spreads can appear invariant to expected liquidity.

We develop a parsimonious model to study the effect of regulations aimed at reducing counterparty risk on the structure of over-the-counter securities markets. We find that such regulations promote entry of dealers, thus fostering competition and lowering spreads. Greater competition, however, has an indirect negative effect on market-making profitability. General equilibrium effects imply that more competition can distort incentives of all dealers to invest in efficient technologies ex ante and so can cause a social welfare loss. Our results are consistent with empirical findings on the effects of post-crisis regulations and with the opposition of some market participants to those regulations.

How do macrofinancial shocks affect investor behavior and market dynamics? Recent evidence on experience effects suggests a long-lasting influence of personally experienced outcomes on investor beliefs and investment but also significant differences across older and younger generations. We formalize experience-based learning in an overlapping generations (OLG) model, where different cross-cohort experiences generate persistent heterogeneity in beliefs, portfolio choices, and trade. The model allows us to characterize a novel link between investor demographics and the dependence of prices on past dividends while also generating known features of asset prices, such as excess volatility and return predictability. The model produces new implications for the cross-section of asset holdings, trade volume, and investors’ heterogeneous responses to crises, which we show to be in line with the data.

A central challenge in the regulation of controlled firms is curbing rent extraction by controllers. As independent directors and fiduciary duties are often insufficient, some jurisdictions give minority shareholders veto rights over related-party transactions. To assess these rights’ effectiveness, we exploit a 2011 Israeli reform that gave minority shareholders veto rights over related-party transactions, including the pay of controllers and their relatives (“controller executives”). We find that the reform curbed controller-executive pay and led some controller executives to resign or go with little or no pay in circumstances suggesting their pay would be rejected. These findings suggest that minority veto rights can be an effective corporate governance tool.

This paper examines whether predictable seasonal patterns in firm fundamentals generate time variation in stock returns. Our findings indicate that stock returns are counterseasonal. Specifically, a long-short strategy of buying low-sales season stocks and shorting high-sales season stocks produces an annual alpha of 8.4% (14.5% over the last decade). This seasonal effect has a relatively high Sharpe ratio and occurs independently of previously documented seasonal anomalies. We analyze several possible hypotheses for this phenomenon.

Using data on over 57,000 low-income tax filers, we estimate the effect of Medicaid access on the propensity of households to save or repay debt from their tax refunds. We instrument for Medicaid access using variation in state eligibility rules. We find substanital heterogeneity across households in the savings response to Medicaid. Households that are not experiencing financial hardship behave in a manner consistent with a precautionary savings model, meaning they save less under Medicaid. In contrast, among households experiencing financial hardship, Medicaid eligibility increases refund savings rates by roughly 5 percentage points or $102. For both sets of households, effects are stronger in states with lower bankruptcy exemption limits—consistent with uninsured, financially constrained households using bankruptcy to manage health expenditure risk. Our results imply that expansions to the social safety net may affect the magnitude of the consumption response to tax rebates.