Knowledge that Transforms

We analyze the reaction of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. All reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations, especially for systemic banks. However, banks’ profitability was also affected, showing up in lower equity returns. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd-Frank Act (especially the Volcker rule), whereas market reactions to the German restructuring law were small.

Multiple bank lending induces borrowers to take too much debt when creditor rights are poorly protected; moreover, banks wish to engage in opportunistic lending at their competitors’ expenses if borrowers’ collateral is sufficiently risky. These incentives lead to credit rationing and positive-profit interest rates, possibly exceeding the monopoly level. If banks share information about past debts and seniority via credit reporting systems, the incentive to overborrow is mitigated: interest and default rates decrease; credit access improves if the value of collateral is not very volatile, but worsens otherwise. Recent empirical studies report evidence consistent with these predictions. The article also shows that private and social incentives to share information are not necessarily aligned.

We use a dataset of individual investors containing test-based measures of financial literacy and administrative records on their assets holding and trades before and during the financial crisis of September 2008. We design three tests of the benefits of financial literacy during the Global Financial Crisis, by comparing the decisions actually taken by individuals with a dominated alternative, i.e., one giving lower utility according to simple normative models of financial decision-making. We find that high-literacy investors are better at timing the market. High-literacy investors are also more likely to trade according to the prescriptions of normative models and to detect intermediaries’ potential conflicts of interest. However, though statistically significant, these effects are economically small.

In December 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued new rules that require enhanced disclosure on how firms tie CEO compensation to performance. We use this new available data to study the terms of performance-based awards in CEO compensation contracts in S&P 500 firms. We observe large variations in the choice of performance measures. Our evidence is consistent with predictions from optimal contracting theories: firms rely on performance measures that are more informative of CEO actions.

We study the dynamics of stock market integration and its consequences during the recent financial crisis for twenty-three developed and sixty emerging markets. We find that integration increased slightly for emerging markets but decreased for developed countries during the crisis. Moreover, we argue that the high degree of integration propagated the crisis across the global financial markets at the beginning of the crisis, but it had little effect during the crisis. We also find that integration is mostly affected by financial openness, the institutional environment, and global financial uncertainty but that these determinants vary slightly between emerging and developed markets.

Target acquisitiveness stands out as one of the primary drivers of all the key aspects of the market for corporate takeovers: acquisition announcement returns, probability of deal success, propensity to acquire and be acquired. Acquisitive targets, though a small proportion of the sample, are responsible for half of the overall negative acquisition announcement returns. Our large body of empirical evidence consistently supports the view that the motivation behind acquisitions of acquisitive targets is defensive: acquirers “eat in order not to be eaten”.

Although growth opportunities fade and profitability declines as firms mature, older firms are no more likely to be acquired than young firms are. This article documents and explains that phenomenon. We argue that, because mature organizations are rationally less flexible, they are more costly to integrate and therefore comparatively unattractive acquisition candidates. The evidence supports this explanation of the negative age dependence of takeover hazard. The evidence also shows that negative exogenous shocks to merger benefits further reduce the takeover hazard of mature firms. We test many alternative explanations and find no evidence that they can explain the hazard decline.

This article calibrates a class of jump-diffusion long-run risks models and quantifies how well they can account for both equity and variance risk premiums while generating realistic volatility dynamics. I find that jumps in the level and the volatility of long-run consumption growth rates perform equally well in explaining the variance risk premium. Moreover, compared to jump-in-growth models, jump-in-volatility models generate more realistic volatility dynamics and stronger predictability of returns by the variance risk premium. Finally, both jump-in-volatility and jump-in-growth models suggest that a nontrivial portion of the equity risk premium is due to compensation for jump risks.