Knowledge that Transforms

A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement, instead, exposes arbitrageurs to costly default risk. We show with Bitcoin network and order book data that cross-exchange price differences coincide with periods of high settlement latency, asset flows chase arbitrage opportunities, and price differences across exchanges with low default risk are smaller. Blockchain-based trading thus faces a dilemma: Reliable consensus protocols require time-consuming settlement latency, leading to arbitrage limits. Circumventing such arbitrage costs is possible only by reinstalling trusted intermediation, which mitigates default risk.

This article introduces a new measure of a firm’s negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint (CBF), and studies whether it is priced in an international sample of stocks. On average, the CBF does not explain the cross-section of returns between 2019 and 2022. However, a biodiversity footprint premium (higher returns for firms with larger footprints) began emerging in October 2021 after the Kunming Declaration, which capped the first part of the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15). Consistent with this finding, stocks with large footprints lost value in the days after the Kunming Declaration. The launch of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) in June 2021 had a similar effect. These results indicate that investors have started to require a risk premium upon the prospect of, and uncertainty about, future regulation or litigation to preserve biodiversity.

We examine whether time-varying investor demand affects hedge fund companies’ decision to start new funds. We find significantly more fund inceptions in hot markets than in cold markets. Funds opened in hot markets exhibit weaker long-term performance, shorter survival time, and greater fraud risk. Investor clientele also varies with market conditions. Investors in hot markets appear to be less sophisticated, which may provide opportunities for more low-quality funds to enter the industry. Overall, inceptions due to high investor demand are not in the best interest of investors.

Climate change poses new challenges for portfolio management. In our not-yet-low carbon world, investors face a trade-off between minimizing their exposure to climate risks and maximizing the benefits of portfolio diversification. This article investigates how investors and financial intermediaries navigate this trade-off. After the release of Morningstar’s novel carbon risk metrics in April 2018, mutual funds labeled as “low carbon” experienced a significant increase in investor demand, especially those with high risk-adjusted returns. Fund managers actively reduced their exposure to firms with high carbon risk scores, especially stocks with returns that correlated more with the funds’ portfolios and were thus less useful for diversification. These findings shed light on whether and how climate-related information can re-orient capital flows in a low carbon direction.

We study the impact of an urban land titling program on firm investment in Shenzhen, China. We find that this program increased the investment rate for titling firms, but this positive effect only holds for politically connected firms. Further analysis suggests that the titling effect is more pronounced for those titling firms associated with greater expropriation risk. During program implementation, the connected titling firms increased their investment perhaps because, as observed, they experienced fewer disputes than non-connected titling firms.

This article shows that mutual funds’ trading experiences bias their future repurchasing decisions. Mutual funds are less likely to repurchase a stock if they previously sold the stock for a loss rather than for a gain. After switching to managing a different fund, fund managers still avoid repurchasing stocks they sold for a loss at a past fund. We do not find that mutual fund managers are biased against repurchasing past loser stocks because of superior information. Though less likely to be repurchased, repurchased losers do not underperform repurchased winners—and the fund itself—in the subsequent quarter.

In their indisposed paper, Aswani, Raghunandan, and Rajgopal (ARR) provide a critique of our main findings on the pricing of carbon transition risk in Bolton and Kacperczyk (2021a, 2021b, 2022) and in Bolton, Halem, and Kacperczyk (2022). We take exception to the key elements of their critique. The main findings of their analysis do not contradict our findings. Rather, they corroborate some of our own findings. However, they choose to take a different interpretation from ours based on selective evidence. A large asset-pricing literature seeks to explain the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns based on exposures to aggregate risk factors such as size and book-to-market ratios or firm-specific risk linked to observable firm characteristics. In our empirical studies, we have systematically explored whether investors demand a carbon risk premium as compensation for their exposure to carbon transition risk. We have looked at how stock returns vary with CO2 emissions across firms, industries, and countries and have found consistent evidence around the world of a carbon risk premium for stock returns, and a carbon valuation discount for price–earnings and book-to-market ratios. We have further found that the carbon premium has jumped after the Paris agreement. There was no significant premium right before the Paris agreement but a highly significant and large premium after the agreement.

We find that short sellers manage risks by strategically borrowing shares in stocks with significant ownership by passive investors. This practice increases securities lending demand for stocks with substantial passive ownership, resulting in improved price efficiency, higher lending fees, and increased short interest in these stocks. Consistent with the risk mitigation motive, these stocks show reduced risks of unexpected fee hikes and loan recall, longer loan durations, and attract more informed short sellers. These effects are particularly pronounced in hard-to-borrow stocks where short-sale constraints are binding. Our study suggests that passive investing helps alleviate short-sale constraints by reducing the risks associated with stock borrowing.

We show that callable bonds have both higher yields and lower market prices than matched non-callable bonds of the same issuer-time, reflecting the value of call features to issuers and investors. This “value of callability” as well as the inclusion and the exercise of call rights are jointly determined by issuer credit quality. Critically, our agency-based theoretical and empirical analyses show that callability reduces debt overhang in corporate mergers. Our results help explain the value and increasing prevalence of callable bonds in credit markets.

This article documents fund usages of insider share pledge loans based on transactions data and subsequent corporate activities in Chinese firms. We find that the market has expanded 111 times since 2003, reaching 2.9 trillion RMB by 2017. The expansion is driven by share pledges for financing firms, including focal listed firms and other firms. Among transactions for financing focal listed firms (17.4 percent), 87 percent of the funds flow into the firms. Each 1 percent increase in controlling shareholders’ ownership is associated with a 7.8–11.7 percent increase in the likelihood of pledging shares to finance the focal listed firms and an additional 2.1–5.7 percent for financially constrained firms. The stock market reacts to transactions for financing focal listed firms with abnormal returns around 0.26–0.65 percent and an additional 0.29–4.37 percent for financially constrained firms. These patterns do not exist for share pledges for other purposes or by noncontrolling shareholders.