Knowledge that Transforms

Abstract We study how risks spill over from shadow banking activities to traditional banks through implicit guarantees. Using data on wealth management products (WMPs), China’s largest shadow banking component, we find that banks with higher interbank borrowing rates strategically provide stronger implicit guarantees to their issued WMPs. Extending implicit guarantees builds bank reputations and reduces rollover costs while exposing banks to losses from shadow banking activities. Our findings thus suggest a bank-specific approach to assessing the risk of implicit guarantees based on transparent and real-time interbank rates.

This article investigates how transportation networks shape firms’ geographic footprint by reducing monitoring costs of distant investments. Exploiting the staggered expansions of China’s passenger high-speed rail (HSR) network, we document that the amount of intercity investment between a pair of cities increases by 45% with the introduction of an HSR line connecting the cities. We enhance the causal inference by applying high-dimensional fixed effects, and focusing on city pairs that are “accidentally” connected in the network. The HSR effect is the strongest in industries that require on-site monitoring, as well as for controlling stakes in large distant investments.

Abstract We examine search-based peer (SBP) groups proposed by Lee, Ma, and Wang (2015) and their relationship with commonality in liquidity. Our results confirm that SBP affiliation is a significant determinant of commonality in liquidity and, unlike market- and industry-commonality, SBP-commonality has been increasing over the past 15 years. We separate retail from institutional investor queries by tracing the IP locations of Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) searches. Our results show that retail investors are responsible for roughly 85% of the EDGAR searches that generate SBP groups. Overall, our study provides new evidence of a significant demand-side commonality associated with SBP affiliations.

Classic bond pricing centralizes bond valuation across all maturities by specifying the dynamics of the short-term interest rate. This article develops a decentralized theory that prices each bond based purely on the near-term behavior of the bond’s own yield. The theory levers the domain expertise of an investor on a particular bond and allows the investor to make pricing and investment analysis on the bond without the shackles of an ambitious centralizing mandate. The theory decomposes the short-term return on a bond with respect to the variation of its own yield. Imposing no dynamic arbitrage on the return decomposition leads to a simple pricing equation relating the bond yield to the market pricing and conditional mean and variance forecasts of the yield’s near-term change. The article illustrates the theory’s applications in decentralized investment of a single bond and in the construction and investment of decentralized butterfly bond portfolios.

Abstract Financial markets have a central role in allocating resources in modern economies. One of the main functions of financial markets is the discovery of information. This information in turn helps guide decisions in the real side of the economy. The literature on the “feedback effect” of financial markets explores this channel. Empirical work tries to identify the informational feedback from markets to corporate decisions. Theoretical work explores implications that this feedback effect has for the equilibrium in financial markets and for economic efficiency. Current trends in information technology under the FinTech revolution change the nature of information processing in financial markets and so may change the nature of the feedback effect. In this article, I review the main themes of this developing literature and connect them to the current information revolution. I also discuss directions for future research.

Abstract This article develops a model to explore the implications of nondistressed debt renegotiation on debt prices and corporate policies. The model incorporates the empirical observation that creditors can influence firms also outside corporate distress through debt covenant renegotiation and not only in distress. We find that considering both distressed and nondistressed creditor interventions is key to investigating how creditor governance affects firms. The model explains cross-sectional patterns of control premiums and credit spreads that traditional debt renegotiation models do not capture. We also derive novel implications for the impact of firm characteristics associated with renegotiation on debt prices and corporate policies.

Abstract Following the crisis, macroprudential regulations targeting mortgage-market vulnerabilities were widely adopted, their success often relying on the response of financial intermediaries. We provide evidence from Canada suggesting banks may have behaved strategically to limit the effectiveness of recently implemented mortgage stress tests. Before implementation, borrowers had to prove they could make mortgage payments based on the interest rate specified in the contract. The new tests require borrowers to show they can afford payments based on a typically higher qualifying rate, derived from the mode of 5-year rates posted by the six largest banks. The government’s objective was to cool credit markets, but, since many mortgages are government-insured, the big banks’ interests were not aligned. We find evidence of rate manipulation using a difference-in-differences approach comparing changes in spreads for 5-year mortgages with 3-year spreads, unaffected by the policy. The qualifying rates were lowered encouraging continued borrowing, muting the tests’ impact.

Abstract The distress anomaly reflects the abnormally low returns of high credit risk stocks during financial distress. Evidence from stocks and corporate bonds reinforces the anomaly and challenges rationales based on shareholders’ ability to extract value from bondholders, time-varying betas, lottery-type preferences, biased earnings expectations, and limits-to-arbitrage. Moreover, mispricing of distressed stocks and bonds is associated with excess investment and excess external financing. Potential real distortions are materially understated when assessed based only on equity mispricing. We emphasize the important role of corporate bonds in dissecting the distress anomaly, and show that the anomaly is an unresolved puzzle.

Abstract This paper examines the role of local politicians’ patronage connections to top political leaders (i.e., the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) in privatization outcomes. We find that connected local politicians are more likely to sell state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to corrupt buyers at substantially discounted prices. The SOEs purchased by corrupt buyers engage in significantly more fraudulent and corrupt activities following privatization and thus perform worse. For identification, we use the mandatory retirement ages of Central Committee members in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. When local politicians lose their connections because Central Committee members step down after reaching mandatory retirement ages, we find a 14.4 percentage point drop in the likelihood of choosing corrupt buyers and a 90.13% drop in price discounts for privatization sales. Consequently, the privatized SOEs experience jumps in efficiency gains after the age cut-offs for mandatory retirement.

Abstract We survey a large sample of Swedish households and connect the responses to administrative data to relate pro-environmental attitudes and values to actual investment decisions. Pro-environment households are not more likely to hold pro-environment portfolios. This results from financial disengagement: they are less likely to own stocks, check pension balances, or make green active retirement planning choices. Green financial engagement is stronger in settings where financial literacy is higher or where informational hurdles are lower. Informational barriers appear to prevent financial market prices and returns from fully reflecting household environmental preferences.