Knowledge that Transforms

Past studies typically have focused on whether people perceive more rare risk after experiencing catastrophic disasters. We show that people can also feel less risk with unexpected lucky disaster experience. By exploring a novel identification strategy based on households’ expectations, we find that households perceive less (more) risk when they experience disasters that have lower (higher) fatalities than what was expected. This opposite experience effect of rare disasters is substantial. A one standard deviation increase in the negative (positive) experience shock is associated with a 1.71% decrease (a 1.31% increase) in the life insurance-to-portfolio ratio. We discuss three possible mechanisms to account for our empirical findings: incomplete information learning, salience theory, and change in risk preferences.

We study the effects of collateral constraints in an economy populated by investors with nonpledgeable labor incomes and heterogeneous preferences and beliefs. We show that these constraints inflate stock prices and generate spikes and crashes in price-dividend ratios and volatilities, clustering of volatilities, and leverage cycles. They also lead to substantial decreases in interest rates and increases in Sharpe ratios when investors are anxious about hitting constraints due to production crises in the economy. Furthermore, stock prices have large collateral premiums over nonpledgeable incomes. We derive asset prices and stationary distributions of the investors’ consumption shares in closed form.

Investors increasingly look for private equity managers to provide opportunities for co-investing outside the fund structure, thereby saving fees and carried interest payments. In this paper, we use a large sample of buyout and venture capital co-investments to test how such deals compare with the remaining fund investments. In contrast to Fang, Ivashina, and Lerner (2015), we find no evidence of adverse selection. Gross return distributions of co-investments and other deals are similar. Co-investments generally have lower costs to investors. We simulate net returns to investors and demonstrate how reasonably sized portfolios of co-investments significantly outperform fund returns.

In 2012, the US Department of Labor imposed new disclosure requirements for indirect fees that 401(k) retirement plan service providers earn through revenue sharing agreements with mutual funds. This paper examines the impact of these fee disclosure requirements on the level and structure of fees paid by retirement plans, as well as service providers’ ability to price discriminate between plan sponsors of different sophistication. We document that the new disclosure requirements are associated with a substitution of direct fees for indirect fees and a reduction in total fees paid by smaller plans, and that mutual fund providers responded by introducing retirement fund share classes with lower 12b-1 fees.

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it impossible for the minority to know whether these shares are cheap or overpriced. Our analysis can help explain why sophisticated investors in unlisted firms and regulators of listed firms do not rely entirely on preemptive rights to address cheap-stock tunneling, supplementing them with other restrictions on equity issues.

The arrival of a public signal worsens the adverse selection problem if informed investors are risk averse. Precisely, the public signal reduces uncertainty which boosts informed investors’ participation leading to a more toxic order flow. I confirm the model’s empirical predictions by estimating the effect of the publication of the weekly change in oil inventories on liquidity via a difference-in-differences strategy. The bid-ask spread of stocks related to oil doubles after the release and their volume increases by 32% regardless of the report’s surprise. Further, consistent with the model, implied volatility drops and insider’s trading increases after the report’s publication.

We study informational freeriding in a model where agents privately acquire information and then decide when to reveal it by taking an action. Examples of such freeriding are prevalent in financial markets, e.g., the timing of initial public offerings, analysts’ forecasts, and mutual funds’ investment decisions. The main results show that, in large populations, few agents provide significant information while the vast majority of agents freeride. We highlight the role of uncertainty and market size in shaping the dynamics of price discovery. Among other results, we find that heightened uncertainty over the underlying state enhances information production, yet weakens the precision and speed of information aggregation in the market.

We find that Treasury floating rate notes (FRNs) trade at a significant premium relative to the prices of Treasury bills and notes. This premium is directly related to the near-constant nature of FRN prices and is correlated with measures reflecting investor demand for safe assets. Money market funds are often the primary investors in FRNs, and the FRN premium is related to flows into funds with fixed net asset values, but not to flows into funds with variable net asset values. These results provide strong evidence that the FRN premium represents a convenience yield for the mark-to-market stability feature of FRNs.

Starting with the fundamental relation that state prices are the product of physical probabilities and the stochastic discount factor, Ross (2015) shows that, given strong assumptions, knowing state prices suffices to back out physical probabilities and the stochastic discount factor at the same time. We find that such recovered physical distributions based on the S&P 500 index are incompatible with future returns and fail to predict future returns and realized variances. These negative results are even stronger when we add economically reasonable constraints. Simple benchmark methods based on a power utility agent or the historical return distribution cannot be rejected.

To assess the importance of inflation risk for nominal Treasury yields, a novel quadratic term structure model with time-varying inflation risk is estimated using survey-based inflation uncertainty. The resulting yield decomposition captures very diverse macroeconomic dynamics of inflation and real risk premiums (large and positive during the 1980s but small and negative post-2008) and generates sensible high-frequency estimates of expected inflation and real short rates over a long sample. The explicit link between the model-implied factors and macro fundamentals reveals that short- but not long-run fluctuations are unspanned by yields, consistent with an interest rate policy unresponsive to transient inflation shocks.