Knowledge that Transforms

This study provides evidence on the existence of a negative greenium, i.e. a risk premium related to the greenness of a firm, based on European individual stock returns. We define a priced ‘greenness and transparency’ factor based on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions and the quality of their environmental disclosures, and show that what is priced by the market is the combination of environmental performance and environmental transparency. Based on this factor, we offer a tool to assess the exposure of a portfolio to the risk associated with the low-carbon transition, and hedge against it. We estimate that in a stressed scenario where greener and more transparent firms very much outperform brown stocks, there would be losses at the global level, including for European large banks, should investors fail to price climate-transition risks. These results call for the introduction of climate stress tests for systemically important financial institutions.

We study an equilibrium risk and return model to explore the effects of the coronavirus crisis and associated skewness on the market price of risk. We derive the moment and equilibrium equations, specifying skewness price of risk as an additive component of the effect of variance on mean expected return. We estimate our model using the flexible skewed generalized error distribution, for which we derive the distribution of returns and the likelihood function. Using S&P 500 Index returns from January 1980 to mid-October 2020, our results show that the coronavirus crisis generated a deeply negative reaction in the skewness and total market price of risk, more negative even than the subprime and the October 1987 crises.

We study the influence of policy uncertainty on the moral behavior of firms. When facing uncertainty, managers perceive various socioeconomic obstacles as more severe and disruptive to their business. Using data from policy uncertainty spouts in 93 countries, we document that some firms engage in norm-deviant behavior by cheating on taxes and paying more bribes. While private firms prefer to cheat on taxes, public firms choose bribery as a favorite tool to “grease the wheels” during periods of uncertainty. Strong social capital (local trust and religiosity) breaks this link between uncertainty and corruption.

This study disentangles a measure of implied skewness that is related to downward movements in the U.S. equity index from the corresponding implied skewness that is associated with upward movements. A positive SKEW index is constructed from S&P 500 call options, whereas a negative SKEW index is constructed from the S&P 500 put options. We show that the positive SKEW is linked to market sentiment, whereas the negative SKEW is related to existing tail risk measures. The negative SKEW is proposed as a more objective prudent tail risk measure, and it is found to be able to predict recessions, market downturns, and uncertainty indicators up to one year in advance. The predictive power of the negative SKEW is also confirmed when we control for other tail risk measures and also out-of-sample.

This paper investigates the effects of ownership patterns on banks’ cost and profit efficiencies taking a sample of 607 commercial banks operating in 53 African countries during the period 2005–2015. Using pooled and modified true fixed effects (TFE) stochastic frontier panel approaches, we obtain two principal results. First, foreign-owned banks are not more profit or cost efficient than their domestic peers. Second, privately owned banks outperform state-owned banks. These findings result not only from bank-level inefficiencies but are explained by bank-level characteristics and macroeconomic conditions. Specifically, larger, older, and listed banks are associated with higher profit efficiency. This study also reveals that ownership concentration (blockholding) has adverse effects on the efficiency of banks.

Using experimental data, we document that the impact of professional norms on the risk-taking of bank employees depends on their expectations of peers’ risk preferences. When the professional identity of bank employees is made salient, those who expect colleagues to take more risk than themselves increase risky investments by 5.2% points in a mock investment task, while others do not statistically change their risk-taking behaviors. Data from placebo experiments with non-bank employees do not exhibit such empirical patterns. The results are consistent with peer effects and social identity theories, and challenge the existing evidence that professional norms in the banking industry decrease risk-taking.

Despite the devastating worldwide human and economic tolls of the COVID-19 crisis, it has created some positive economic and financial surprises and opportunities for research. This paper highlights two such favorable surprises - the shortest U.S. recession on record and the avoidance of any banking crisis - and a number of research opportunities. The paper ties the "economic surprise" of the short recession to the speed and size of U.S. stimulus programs during COVID-19 - faster and larger than for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We connect the "financial surprise" of the resilient banking sector to prudential policies put in place during and after the GFC that fortified U.S. banks prior to COVID-19. These twin "surprises" are also mutually reinforcing - if either the economy or banking system had failed, so would the other. The paper also reviews extant COVID-19 banking research and suggest paths for future research. It recommends that particular attention be paid to research outside of the U.S. - where fewer favorable "surprises" may be present - as the best way to advance knowledge in this area.

This paper studies how the COVID-19 shock affects the CDS spread changes and abnormal stock returns of U.S. firms with different levels of debt rollover risk. We use the COVID-19 crisis as a quasi-natural experiment of adverse cash flow shock that increases the default risk of firms facing an immediate liquidity shortfall. We find that the COVID-19 shock significantly increased the CDS spread and decreased the shareholder value for firms facing higher debt rollover risk. The effect is stronger for non-financial firms, for firms that are financially constrained, and for firms that are highly volatile. Moreover, we find that firms with immediate refinancing needs suffered more than firms with distant refinancing needs during the COVID-19 shock, which further confirms that firms’ debt rollover risk is indeed a key factor that drives the heterogenous reactions to the shock. The paper provides fresh insights into the role of firms’ debt rollover risk during the COVID-19 health crisis.

We show that firms’ organization capital has a positive and economically important impact on innovation. Specifically, we find that firms with more organization capital have greater number of patents and receive more citations on their patents. The results are robust to alternative measures of organization capital and innovation, and endogeneity concerns. We also find that the ability to handle inherent difficulties associated with the innovation process and the reduction in managerial career concern threats are possible mechanisms through which organization capital affects firm innovation positively. These results provide strong evidence of the importance of a firm’s organization capital in their innovation process.

US credit unions have been subject to a strict regulation of their commercial lending which included both requirements for enhanced organizational practices and a cap on the proportion of business loans relative to assets (imposed in 1998 by US Congress). Since 2003, however, these limitations have been steadily relaxed, a process which has resulted in an increase in credit union business lending activity. Using data from the universe of US credit unions we provide comprehensive evidence that expansion of the business loan portfolio increases the risk of the asset side of the credit union. This is the case even for credit unions which benefit from partnership with the SBA, for which we observe an initial increase in the risk of non-SBA backed loans (an overconfidence effect) which reverses over time (a learning effect). Our results suggest, furthermore, that the risk of business loans is exacerbated for credit unions which initiate their business loan activity and which do so rapidly. In the second part of our analysis we provide descriptive and quasi-experimental evidence that expansions of credit union activity into business loans are associated with lower subsequent growth rates of deposits. This result is similar to the reaction to risk indicators found in the banking literature and might give an ex-ante incentive for the CU that could work as a market-based stabilization mechanism complementary to that of explicit regulation.