Knowledge that Transforms

The promise of contingent convertible capital securities (CoCos) as a ”bail-in” solution has been the subject of considerable theoretical analysis and debate, but little is known about their effects in practice. We undertake the first comprehensive empirical analysis of bank CoCo issues, a market segment that comprises over 730 instruments totaling $521 billion. Four main findings emerge: (1) the propensity to issue a CoCo is higher for larger and better capitalized banks; (2) CoCo issues result in a statistically significant decline in issuers’ CDS spread, indicating that they generate risk-reduction benefits and lower costs of debt (this is especially true for CoCos that convert into equity, have mechanical triggers, and are classified as Additional Tier 1 instruments); (3) CoCos with only discretionary triggers do not have a significant impact on CDS spreads; and (4) CoCo issues have no statistically significant impact on stock prices, except for principal write-down CoCos with a high trigger level, which have a positive effect.

After decades of de-prioritizing shareholders’ economic interests and low corporate profitability, Japan introduced the JPX-Nikkei400 in 2014. The index highlighted the country’s “best-run” companies by annually selecting the 400 most profitable of its large and liquid firms. We find that managers competed for inclusion in the index by significantly increasing return on equity (ROE), and they did so at least in part due to their reputational or status concerns. The ROE increase was predominantly driven by improvements in margins, which were in turn partially driven by cutting research and development (R&D) intensity. Our findings suggest that indexes can affect managerial behavior through reputational or status incentives.

After initial investments, relationship financiers routinely observe interim information about projects before continuing financing them. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs produce information endogenously and issue securities to incumbent insider and competitive outsider investors. In such persuasion games with differentially informed receivers and contingent transfers, entrepreneurs’ endogenous experimentation reduces insiders’ information monopoly but impedes relationship formation through an “information production hold-up.” Insiders’ information production and interim competition mitigate this hold-up and jointly explain empirical links between competition and relationship lending. Optimal contracts restore first-best outcomes using convertible securities for insiders and residuals for outsiders. Our findings are robust under various extensions and alternative specifications.

We estimate institutional investor preferences from proxy voting records. The W-NOMINATE method maps investors onto a left-right dimension based on votes for fiscal year 2012. Public pension funds and other investors on the left support a more social and environment-friendly orientation of the firm and fewer executive compensation proposals. “Money-conscious” investors appear on the right. The proxy advisor ISS makes voting recommendations that place it center, to the left of most large mutual funds. A second dimension reflects a more traditional governance view, with management-disciplinarian investors, the proxy advisor Glass Lewis among them, pitted against more management-friendly ones.

We document a new phenomenon in bond and equity markets that we call cross-asset time series momentum. Using data from 20 countries, we show that past bond market returns are positive predictors of future equity market returns and past equity market returns are negative predictors of future bond market returns. We use this predictability to construct a diversified cross-asset time series momentum portfolio that yields a Sharpe ratio 45% higher than a standard time series momentum portfolio. We present evidence that time series momentum and cross-asset time series momentum are driven by slow-moving capital in bond and equity markets.

We examine realized spreads and price impact in clock and trade time following each trade in all common stocks from 2010 to 2017. The term structure of realized spreads (price impact) is sharply downward (upward) sloping, implying that (a) market maker profitability is sensitive to speed, and (b) the choice of the horizon of measurement is critical when drawing inferences from spread decompositions. The majority of the price impact of trades in large (small)-capitalization stocks takes place within 15 (60) seconds. Net profits to liquidity provision, or equivalently, net costs to liquidity demanders, decline over the sample period even at the shortest horizons that we consider: at the 100 ms horizon, aggregate profits decline from 1.9 basis points of total dollar volume in 2010 to 1.0 basis points in 2017.

We study the international propagation of long-run risk in the context of a general equilibrium model with endogenous growth. Innovation and international diffusion of technologies are the channels at the core of our mechanism. A calibrated version of the model matches several asset pricing and macroeconomic quantity moments, alleviating some of the puzzles highlighted in the international macro-finance literature. Our model predicts that country pairs that share more research and development (R&D) have less volatile exchange rates and more correlated stock market returns. Using data from a sample of 19 developed countries, we provide suggestive empirical evidence in favor of our model’s predictions.

Using a novel pairwise measure of firms’ acquisition of rivals’ disclosures, we show that investment opportunities drive interfirm information flows. We find that these flows predict subsequent mergers and acquisitions as well as how and how much firms invest, relative to rivals. Moreover, firms’ use of rivals’ information often hinges on the similarities of their products. Our results suggest that rivals’ public information, far from being unusable, helps facilitate investment and product decisions, including acquisitions and product differentiation strategies. The findings also support a learning mechanism that could partly underlie the emerging literature on peer investment effects.

We study the consequences of a 2010 change in the investment adviser qualification exam that reallocated coverage from the rules and ethics section to the technical material section. Comparing advisers with the same employer in the same location and year, we find those passing the exam with more rules and ethics coverage are one-fourth less likely to commit misconduct. The exam change appears to affect advisers’ perception of acceptable conduct and not just their awareness of specific rules or selection into the qualification. Those passing the rules and ethics-focused exam are more likely to depart employers experiencing scandals. Such departures also predict future scandals. Our paper offers the first archival evidence on how rules and ethics training affects conduct and labor market activity in the financial sector.

This paper examines the joint determination of deviations in long-term covered interest rate parity and differences in the credit spread of bonds of similar risk but different currency denomination. These two pricing anomalies are highly aligned in both the time series and the cross-section of currencies. The sum of these two pricing deviations—the corporate basis—represents the currency-hedged borrowing cost difference between currency regions and explains up to a third of the variation in the aggregate corporate debt issuance flow. I show that arbitrage aimed at exploiting one type of security anomaly can give rise to the other.