Knowledge that Transforms

In a general equilibrium framework, we show that banks may “buy” political influence at a discount: They offer disproportionately small campaign contributions compared to the influence they exert, thus generating abnormal returns. We distinguish between the direct effect of contributions which, as a cost, reduce bank returns, and the indirect effect of contributions which boost returns via inducing bank-favoring policies. Therefore, abnormal returns may or may not increase with the amount of contributions, depending on which effect dominates: Stricter capital requirements decrease contributions and abnormal returns. When politicians attach more weight to households’ welfare, contributions increase and abnormal returns decrease.

Retail order imbalance positively predicts returns, but on average retail investor trades lose money. Why? Order imbalance tests equal-weighted stocks, but retail purchases concentrate on attention-grabbing stocks that subsequently underperform. Long–short strategies based on extreme quintiles of retail order imbalance earn dismal annualized returns of −14.8% among stocks with heavy retail trading but earn 6.6% among other stocks. Our results reconcile the literatures on the performance of retail investors, the predictive content of retail order imbalance, and attention-induced trading and returns. Smaller retail trades concentrate more on attention-grabbing stocks and perform worse.

We examine the effects of implementing a U.S. approach to the enforcement of mandatory disclosure in China. Using a hand-collected sample of comment letters (CLs) issued by the Shanghai Stock Exchange over the period of 2013 to 2018, we show that stock price reactions to CL receipts and replies are negative and significant. Using textual analysis to match issues raised by regulators to targeted firms’ changes in disclosure, we show that these firms do address CL issues point by point, but do not experience significant improvements in their information environments. Our article highlights the importance of incentives rather than regulation/enforcement in reducing information asymmetry.

We document fragile demand for socially responsible investments (SRIs) by retail mutual fund investors. Using COVID-19 as an economic shock, we show funds with higher sustainability ratings experienced sharper declines in retail flows during the pandemic, controlling for fund characteristics. The decline in retail SRI fund flows is sharper than that of institutional flows, more pronounced when economies are hit harder by COVID-19, and unlikely to be driven by fund performance, past flows and size, or shifting investor attention. Corroborated by out-of-sample survey evidence, our findings highlight the high sensitivity of SRI demand by retail investors with respect to income shocks.

We study how banks use “regulatory adjustments” to inflate their regulatory capital ratios and whether this depends on forbearance on the part of national authorities. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels of regulatory capital via a reduction in regulatory adjustments (without a commensurate increase in book equity and without a reduction in bank risk). We document substantial heterogeneity in regulatory capital inflation across countries, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations.

We show that a common component governs volatility dynamics across a wide range of traded equity factors. This “common factor volatility” (CFV) exists even among orthogonal factors. CFV occurs in both cash-flow and discount-rate components of factor returns and derives from market responses to fundamental news rather than underlying commonality in news volatility. Incorporating CFV improves factor volatility forecasts relative to models that include only own-factor volatility. CFV allows us to characterize stochastic discount factor (SDF) volatility dynamics in a very general sense and we show that many popular models imply SDFs with time-varying volatility that correlates strongly with CFV.

Contrary to leading asset pricing theories, recent empirical evidence indicates that financial markets compensate only short-term equity variance risk. An equilibrium model with generalized disappointment aversion risk preferences and rare events reconciles salient features of the variance term structure. In addition, a calibration explains the variance and skew risk premiums in equity returns and the implied volatility skew of index options while capturing standard moments of fundamentals, equity returns, and the risk-free rate. The key intuition for the results stems from substantial countercyclical risk aversion induced by endogenous variation in the probability of disappointing events in consumption growth.

What are the implications of an aging population for financial stability? To examine this question, we exploit geographic variation in aging across U.S. counties. We establish that banks with higher exposure to aging counties increase loan-to-income ratios. Laxer lending standards lead to higher nonperforming loans during downturns, suggesting higher credit risk. Inspecting the mechanism shows that aging drives risk-taking through two contemporaneous channels: deposit inflows due to seniors’ propensity to save in deposits; and depressed local investment opportunities due to seniors’ lower credit demand. Banks thus look for riskier clients, especially in counties where they operate no branches.

Using random H-1B visa lotteries as a natural experiment, we find that firms respond to shortages of high-skilled workers by acquiring firms that employ such workers. The effect is stronger among firms with high human capital and more senior workforces, firms facing tight labor markets and legal barriers to poaching workers, and firms lacking foreign affiliates. The acquired workers are highly educated, sharing skills and occupations similar to those of the acquirer’s existing workers. Our findings suggest skilled labor is an important driver of acquisitions and acquiring is an effective means of obtaining skilled labor.

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing, in which shocks to the value of collateralizable assets generate variation in firms’ debt capacity. We show that the degree of similarity among firms’ financial flexibility forecasts cross-sectional variation in return correlation. We test the implications of the model with firm-level data in two empirical analyses using i) an instrumental variable approach based on shocks to the value of collateralizable corporate assets and ii) the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis as an event study. We find that firms in the same percentile of the cross-sectional distribution of financial flexibility have 62% higher correlation in stock-return residuals than firms 50 percentiles apart.