Knowledge that Transforms

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.

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with structured retail products. We find that cryptocurrency investors are active traders who are prone to investment biases and hold risky portfolios. Cryptocurrency investors are more likely to invest in stocks with high media sentiment and more likely to employ heuristics from technical analysis. In line with attention effects and anticipatory utility, we find that the average cryptocurrency investor substantially increases account logins and trading activity after his or her first cryptocurrency purchase. Furthermore, cryptocurrency investors tend to tilt their portfolios toward even more risky securities after cryptocurrency adoption. Our results document which investors are more likely to adopt new financial products and help inform regulators about investors’ vulnerability to cryptocurrency investments.

We show that credit rating agencies can influence political elections. We find that incumbent political parties experience an increase in their vote shares following municipal bond upgrades. The evidence is consistent with rating agencies affecting elections indirectly by expanding local governments’ debt capacity and directly through an impact on voters’ perceptions of the quality of incumbent politicians. To identify these effects, we examine election outcomes within neighboring counties by exploiting exogenous variation in municipal bond ratings due to Moody’s recalibration of its scale in 2010.

Using a portfolio theory framework, we introduce the concept of “political beta” to model firm-level export diversification in response to global political risk. Our model predicts that firms are less responsive to changes in political relations with lower beta countries—those that contribute less to the firm’s total political risk. We document patterns consistent with our model using disaggregated Russian firm-by-destination-country data during 2001–2011: Trade is positively correlated with political relations, though the effect is far weaker for trading partners whose political relations with Russia are relatively uncorrelated with those of other partners in a firm’s export portfolio.

Relative performance (RPE) awards have become an important component of executive compensation. We examine whether RPE awards, particularly the peer group, are structured in a manner consistent with economic theory. For RPE awards using a custom peer group, we find that the custom group is significantly more effective than four plausible alternative peer groups at filtering out common shocks, lowering the cost of compensation, and increasing managerial incentives. For RPE awards using a market index, we find some evidence that firms could have selected a custom set of peers with better filtering properties at a lower cost with similar incentives. For example, firms could have saved around $118,000 in present value terms, on average, for an RPE award had they chosen a custom group comprising of their product market peers instead of a market index.

We investigate how liquidity regulations affect banks by examining a dormant monetary policy tool that functions as a liquidity regulation. For causal inference, we use a regression kink design that relies on the variation in a marginal high-quality liquid asset requirement around an exogenous threshold. We show that mandated increases in liquidity cause banks to reduce credit supply. Liquidity requirements also depress banks’ profitability, though some of the regulatory costs are passed on to liability holders. We document a prudential benefit of liquidity requirements by showing that banks subject to a higher requirement just before the financial crisis had lower odds of failure.

We price the risky component of specialness spreads—identified by their deviations from the expected auction cycle—within a dynamic term structure model estimated using daily prices of all outstanding Treasury securities and corresponding special collateral (SC) repo rates. This allows us to derive a time-varying SC risk premium that we quantitatively link to various price anomalies, such as the on-the-run premium. The SC risk premium explains about 80% of the on-the-run premium and a substantial share of other Treasury price anomalies, suggesting that unexpected fluctuations in the specialness spreads of recently issued nominal Treasury securities are a common risk factor.

We study the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the term structure of nominal interest rates. In a general equilibrium model populated by an uncertainty averse agent, we show that political uncertainty not only affects the yield curve and the corresponding volatility term structure but also bond risk premia carry a premium for political uncertainty. Our model simultaneously captures both the shape of the yield curve and the hump shape of yield volatilities, a stylized feature that is hard to match with a theoretical model. Our model gives rise to a set of testable predictions for which we find strong support in the data: Higher policy uncertainty leads to a significant decline in yield levels and increases bond yield volatilities. Moreover, policy uncertainty predicts future short rates and has an ambiguous effect on term premia. Finally, short (long) maturity bond risk premia respond negatively (positively) to increases in policy uncertainty.

Different share classes on the same firms provide a natural experiment to explore how investor clienteles affect momentum and short-term reversals. Domestic retail investors have a greater presence in Chinese A shares and foreign institutions are relatively more prevalent in B shares. These differences result from currency conversion restrictions and mandated investment quotas. We find that only B shares exhibit momentum and earnings drift and only A shares exhibit monthly reversals. Institutional ownership strengthens momentum in B shares. These patterns accord with a setting where short-term reversals (which represent inventory risk premia) prevail in a market dominated by noise traders and momentum prevails in markets where noise traders are less prevalent relative to informed investors who underreact to fundamental signals. Overall, our findings confirm that clienteles matter in generating stock return predictability from past returns.

Mandated post-trade transparency in secondary markets lowers the cost of issuing corporate bonds. We show that costs are lower due to the mitigation of information asymmetry in the issuing process. Three pieces of evidence support this finding. First, new issues with higher information asymmetry experience relatively larger reductions in issuing costs. These bonds also experience lower reductions in trading activity than lower information asymmetry bonds, so liquidity cannot explain these results. Second, when a larger fraction of trades in comparable bonds are made post-trade transparent, new issue pricing improves. This holds when conditioning on expected bond liquidity. Third, transparency raises prices in the secondary market, but not by as much as it does for newly issued bonds.