Knowledge that Transforms

Using administrative data on credit profiles matched with unemployment insurance (UI) for individuals in the U.S., we show that laid-off workers with access to Uber rely less on household debt, experience fewer delinquencies, and are less likely to apply for UI benefits. Our empirical strategy exploits both the staggered market entry of Uber across cities and the differential benefit of its entry across car owners based on car age, a key eligibility requirement of the platform. We conclude that the introduction of Uber reduced reliance on these alternative means of smoothing extreme income shocks.

We study how state pension windfalls affect property prices near state borders, where theory suggests real estate reflects the value of additional public resources. Windfalls, representing a source of state revenue about half the size of total taxes, provide economically significant and plausibly exogenous variation in fiscal conditions. We find that each dollar of pension asset returns increases border house prices by approximately two dollars, suggesting that governments allocate additional funds towards high-value projects or tax abatement rather than wasting incremental resources. Evidence of larger effects in financially constrained municipalities highlights how fiscal resources amplify welfare effects of economic shocks.

We analyze survey data on ESG beliefs and preferences in a large panel of retail investors linked to administrative data on their investment portfolios. The survey elicits investors’ expectations of long-term ESG equity returns and asks about their motivations, if any, to invest in ESG assets. We document four facts. First, investors generally expected ESG investments to underperform the market. Between mid-2021 and late-2023, the average expected 10-year annualized return of ESG investments relative to the overall stock market was −2.1%. Second, there is substantial heterogeneity across investors in their ESG return expectations and their motives for ESG investing: 48% of survey respondents do not see any reason to invest in ESG, 24% are primarily motivated by ethical considerations, 22% are driven by climate hedging motives, and 6% are motivated by return expectations. Third, there is a strong link between individuals’ reported ESG investment motives and their actual investment behaviors, with the highest ESG portfolio holdings among individuals who report ethics-driven investment motives. Fourth, financial considerations matter independently of other investment motives: we find meaningful ESG holdings only for investors who expect these investments to outperform the market, even among those investors who reported that their most important ESG investment motives were ethical or hedging reasons.

Much of Mike Jensen's research is foundational, including his early publications, which focus on empirical asset pricing. For example, Jensen's alpha, which he developss in Jensen (1968 and 1969) to evaluate mutual fund managers, is the foundation for most measures of investment performance. Similarly, in Fama et al (1969), Jensen and coauthors present the first event study, Thereafter, event studies play a major role in finance, accounting, and legal research. Finally, Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) develop a key insight about the importance of interdependence of sampling errors in the precision of asset pricing tests.

We use Swedish administrative data to study the role of unemployment risk in salaried employees’ decisions to become entrepreneurs. Using the 2001 relaxation of Sweden’s last-in-first-out (LIFO) dismissal rule as an exogenous shock to unemployment risk, we find that employees facing increased unemployment risk are more likely to become entrepreneurs. The effect is more pronounced for employees with longer tenure, as they were newly exposed to greater unemployment risk. When we track entrepreneurs’ income dynamics and the performance of their ventures, we find that entrepreneurs who used to face greater unemployment risk do not underperform compared to other entrepreneurs. Our results provide some of the first empirical evidence of how employees respond to increased unemployment risk.

We document a new anomaly that we prove standard preference models are unable to capture, regardless of functional form or parametric specification used. Analyzing trading behavior in the binary option market for retail investors, we find that market participants purchase binary options although strictly dominant bull spreads are available at lower prices: 15% of S&P index, 19% of gold, and 25% of silver trades violate no-dominance conditions consistently across three different asset classes. Buyers of dominated binaries lose on average 34% of the contract price by forgoing the dominating product. We prove that neither prospect theory nor ambiguity aversion nor other popular theoretical justifications for retail anomalies such as rational inattention and salience, can capture these results. We also test for, and reject, standard financial explanations including trading costs, liquidity, exchange fixed effects, and noise trading. We show that our results are consistent with retail investors valuing simple, easy-to-understand binary bets. Our work provides a theoretically-grounded empirical impetus for research in behavioral finance which goes beyond historically pervasive utility frameworks.

How do workplace social connections shape everyday entrepreneurship? Using comprehensive data on millions of American workers across the economy, I find three key patterns. First, entrepreneurial coworkers inspire and teach entrepreneurship: individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs after working with coworkers who previously led young businesses. Second, these effects predominantly occur within demographic groups, perpetuating lower entrepreneurship rates for women and Black Americans. Third, these workplace spillovers can increase productivity: individuals exposed to relatively successful coworkers subsequently run successful companies too.

Jensen’s (1986) analysis of the agency costs of free cash flow radically transformed our understanding of corporate payout policy. This paper details the main pre-Jensen advances in the payout literature, explains how his analysis profoundly altered the way financial economists view payout policy, and discusses prominent regularities that provide real-world texture for understanding the importance of his insights about payout policy. These regularities include: (i) the dominance (measured as a percent of value or earnings) of the public equity markets by firms in the distribution phase of the corporate lifecycle; (ii) changes since the 1980s in aggregate cash payouts, the profitability of payers, payout rates, and the set of firms that dominate the payout supply; and (iii) the recent politicization of share repurchases.

We characterize investors’ moral preferences in a parsimonious experimental setting, where we auction stocks with various ethical features. We find strong evidence that investors seek to align their investments with their social values (“value alignment”), and find no evidence of behavior driven by the social impact of investment decisions (“impact-seeking preferences”). First, the willingness to pay (WTP) for a stock is an increasing and quasi-linear function of corporate externalities. Second, this WTP does not change when corporate externalities are made contingent on investors buying the auctioned stock. Our results are thus compatible with a utility-maximization model where non-pecuniary benefits of firms’ externalities only accrue through stock ownership, not through the actual impact of investment decisions. Finally, the ability to directly contribute to the externality (by donating) does not reduce the willingness to pay for virtuous stocks.

We study biodiversity finance—the use of private capital to finance biodiversity conservation and restoration—which is a new practice in sustainable finance. First, we provide a conceptual framework that lays out how biodiversity can be financed by pure private capital and blended financing structures. In the latter, private capital is blended with public or philanthropic capital, whose aim is to de-risk private capital investments. The main element underlying both types of financing is the “monetization” of biodiversity, that is, using investments in biodiversity to generate a financial return for private investors. Second, we provide empirical evidence using deal-level data from a leading biodiversity finance institution. Our findings are consistent with a three-dimensional efficient frontier (return, risk, and biodiversity impact)—deals with a favorable risk-return profile tend to be financed by pure private capital, whereas for other deals the biodiversity impact needs to be sufficiently large for blended finance to be used. Overall, our results suggest that blended finance is an important tool for improving the risk-return profile of these projects, thereby increasing their appeal to private investors and crowding in private capital. Finally, our results suggest that private capital is unlikely to substitute for effective public policies in addressing the biodiversity crisis.