The rise of investments professionally managed with a socially responsible mandate has generated growing interest in environmental and social ratings. However, it is not clear how informative these ratings are or whether they are distorted by greenwashing. Based on the ratings of the leading provider, I offer the first evidence linking greenwashing to ratings inflation. Better ratings do not predict less future corporate bad behavior. This is of concern because it undermines the signaling value of these ratings. To understand these results, I develop a model where the rating agency may underinvest in greenwashing detection while firms have incentives to window dress and engage in greenwashing. Finally, controlling for greenwashing improves ratings predictive quality.

We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decision-making and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to maximize value, their actions during the pandemic should indicate what they perceive as being important for both the preservation and creation of value. PE managers believe that 40% of their portfolio companies are moderately negatively affected and 10% are very negatively affected by the pandemic. The private equity managers—both investment and operating partners—are actively engaged in the operations, governance, and financing in all of their current portfolio companies. These activities are more intensively pursued in those companies that have been more severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result of the pandemic, they expect the performance of their existing funds to decline. They are more pessimistic about that decline than the venture capitalists (VCs) surveyed in Gompers et al. (2021). Despite the pandemic, private equity managers are seeking new investments. Rather than focusing on cost cutting, PE investors place a much greater weight on revenue growth for value creation. Relative to the 2012 survey results reported in Gompers, Kaplan, and Mukharlyamov (2016), they appear to give a larger equity stake to management teams and target somewhat lower returns.

We study whether bank bailouts affect CEO turnover and its subsequent impact on bank risk. Exploiting the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008, we find that TARP funds temporarily decreased the likelihood of bank CEO turnover during the crisis (2008–2010) but significantly increased CEO changes afterwards. Our results show that replacing TARP CEOs reduced individual bank's risk as well as the bank's contributions to the systemic risk. Finally, we find that TARP CEO turnover was mainly driven by a decrease in the bank's political capital. Overall we provide evidence that bank bailouts have important implications for banks’ risk-taking and systemic risk, insofar as bailouts affect bank CEO turnover.

This paper studies the efficiency of competitive equilibria in economies where the expansion of investment is facilitated by securitization. We show that the use of securitization is generally associated with constrained inefficient aggregate investment, thereby potentially justifying regulatory intervention in markets for securitized assets. We examine the effectiveness of two real-world policy instruments to address this inefficiency: ex-ante capital / leverage requirements, as well as skin-in-the game (retention) requirements. We find that leverage/capital restrictions can increase welfare in our environment, but that forcing originators to hold additional skin-in-the game is not welfare improving

Investors delegating their wealth to privately informed managers face not only an intrinsic asymmetric information problem but also a potential misalignment in risk preferences. In this setting, we show that by tying fees symmetrically to the appropriate benchmark investors can tilt a fund portfolio toward their optimal risk exposure and realize nearly all the value of managers’ information. They attain these benefits despite an inherent inefficiency in the choice of the benchmark, and at no extra cost of compensating managers for exposure to relative-performance risk. Under certain conditions, benchmark-adjusted performance fees are necessary to prevent passive alternatives from dominating active management. Our results shed light on a recent debate on the appropriate fee structure of active funds in contexts of high competition from passive funds.

While economic forecasting is ubiquitous within the industry, its role in the trading process has received little attention in the literature. We examine how economist forecasts are related to trading activity in the OTC treasury bond market at the participant level. Consistent with models of heterogeneous opinions, we show that the forecasting economists employing institution places a disproportionately large reliance on the forecast. There is pervasive evidence that this reliance is asymmetric. Only forecasts which imply a fall in future treasury bond prices are associated with an abnormal trading reaction consistent with the forecast. Reference dependence and loss aversion offer one possible explanation for this asymmetric trading response.

Evidence suggests that asset pledgeability, debt complexity, and control rights of dispersed debt influence financial distress resolution. We model how courts’ imperfect verifiability of assets and valuable control of misaligned creditors shape firms’ debt structure and create coordination problems that determine distress outcomes and financing. A key result is that an increase in verifiability allows financially constrained firms to fund projects by pledging more assets to misaligned creditors, making contract renegotiation in distress times more difficult and increasing the probability of bankruptcy. Since equity receives less in the event of distress, constrained firms choose riskier projects with higher returns. Consistent with our model, bankruptcy filings increase after the U.S. Supreme Court decision imposing a “market test” to assess the value of stockholders’ interest in debtor proposals. The effect is stronger for firms with low asset verifiability. These firms also experienced an increase in recovery rates, debt capacity, and risk-taking. Our findings suggest that reforms improving the verifiability of assets substantially impact credit access. However, our results also point out that improving asset verifiability may be insufficient for constrained firms with aligned creditors. Therefore, complementary reforms that facilitate firms’ access to creditors from different market segments may be necessary.

Are more informative credit ratings always preferred and how should regulators intervene to promote investment efficiency? To answer these questions, we develop a model in which a manager seeks financing for a project. The main frictions are that the manager is privately informed about the project’s quality and cannot commit not to divert resources away from it. This setting gives rise to a feedback effect in which creditors’ beliefs about whether the manager diverts resources can become self-fulfilling. A critical consequence of this feedback effect is that more precise ratings can be detrimental for investment efficiency. Intuitively, by revealing that a firm is of worse quality and increasing its cost of finance, more informative ratings strengthen the manager’s incentive to withdraw resources away from the project and default. We show that the regulation of credit rating agencies should be lenient during good times and strict during bad times.

This study examines how the composition of an investment adviser's client base (identified via Form ADV filings) relates to the performance of its mutual funds. Investment advisers catering to institutional clients realize statistically and economically superior risk-adjusted mutual fund performance relative to retail-oriented advisers. Subsequent tests identify the channel(s) responsible for the relationship. The evidence is consistent with both a governance mechanism (i.e., Evans and Fahlenbrach 2012) as well as inefficiencies stemming from the costly search mechanism of Gârleanu and Pedersen's (2018) model for asset management. The results suggest that institutional clients can identify better performing investment managers, particularly in market segments where retail mutual fund investors face higher search costs.

Funds with performance fees have annual net risk-adjusted returns of 0.50% below other funds, a result mostly due to funds without a stochastic benchmark against which performance is measured and funds with a benchmark that is easy to beat. For other funds, there is no evidence of underperformance. Performance fee funds charge total expenses, including the performance fee, that are substantially higher than those of other funds. Investors are more likely to punish poor performance in funds with performance fees than in other funds. Our results indicate that even when fees are less regulated, investors can generally be relied upon to make the right choices, but that there are a subset of funds where performance fees are employed to extract additional fees from investors.