Knowledge that Transforms

This article develops a real options theory to examine the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on foreign direct investment. Firms face a choice between participating in foreign markets through exports or investing abroad to relocate production. The model predicts that the most productive firms invest abroad when exchange rate volatility is low and export otherwise, whereas the least productive firms invest abroad when volatility is high. Aggregation over heterogeneous firms produces a negative and nonlinear relation between exchange rate uncertainty and total international investment. An analysis of eighty-four developed and emerging economies over the 1996–2012 period provides empirical support for the model’s predictions.

This article presents a model that incorporates habit formation and long-run risks into the Epstein–Zin preferences, and reveals intertemporal substitution as a distinctive channel, separate from risk aversion, in generating key asset market phenomena. With habit formation, both the risk aversion and intertemporal substitution channels enhance the market price of short-run consumption risk. With long-run risks, intertemporal substitution reduces the market prices of long-run consumption risks, working against risk aversion. The contrasting effects of the intertemporal substitution channel drive key differences in the model implications of habit formation and long-run risks.

Ample empirical and experimental evidence documents that individuals place greater weight on information gained through personal experience—a phenomenon that Tversky and Kahneman call availability bias. I embed this bias in an overlapping generations equilibrium model in which the period that investors first enter the market establishes the starting point of their experience history. The difference in the individuals’ experience leads to heterogeneity among agents and perceived noise trading. The model captures several empirical findings. It explains why returns on high-volume trading days tend to revert. Furthermore, it provides explanations for a high trading volume, a connection between trading volume and volatility, excess volatility, and overreaction and reversal patterns. Consistent with empirical evidence, young investors buy high and sell low, trade frequently, and obtain lower returns. For intraday trading, it predicts a high trading volume around the opening hours, especially for cross-listed stocks.

We examine how the geographical proximity to a microfinance bank affects financial inclusion. We study the expansion of the branch network of ProCredit banks in South-East Europe between 2006 and 2010. We report three main findings: First, ProCredit is more likely to open a new branch in areas with a large share of low-income households. Second, in locations where ProCredit opens a new branch the share of banked households increases more than in locations where it does not open a new branch. Third, this increase is particularly strong among low-income households, older households, and households which rely on transfer income.

Motivated by the rising importance of international sourcing by US firms in recent decades, we study the influence of international sourcing on capital structure. We find that international sourcing has a significant negative influence on financial leverage. The negative influence is stronger in industries that have high R&D intensities and are financially constrained. However, the negative relation is mitigated when suppliers are from countries with strong legal environments and when the supplier markets are more competitive. Overall, our findings suggest that relationship-specific investments, supplier market characteristics, and financial market conditions are key determinants of the sourcing–leverage relation.

Defined benefit pension and health care plans are important for firm leverage around the world. While consolidating off-balance sheet post-retirement plans increases effective leverage by 32%, firms reduce their level of regular debt by only 22 cents for every dollar of projected benefit obligation, yielding overall 23% higher total leverage of plan sponsors compared with similar firms without post-retirement plans. The most important driver of substitution rates between regular debt and post-retirement obligations is rule of law, followed by labor market freedom and taxes. In contrast, pension guarantee funds and priority of unfunded pension obligations are less important for substitution rates.

We use the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel data set to empirically examine how past house price growth influences the timing of homeownership. We find that the median individual in metropolitan areas with the highest quartile house price growth becomes a homeowner 5 years earlier than that in areas with the lowest quartile house price growth. The result is consistent with a life cycle housing-demand model in which high past price growth increases expectations of future price growth thus accelerating home purchases at young ages. We show that extrapolative expectations formed by homebuyers are a necessary channel to explain the result.

We analyze the reactions of stock returns and the spreads of credit default swaps (CDS) of banks from Europe and the USA to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. Contrary to public perception, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. The reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations relative to the post-bail-out period, especially for systemic banks. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd–Frank Act and in particular for the Volcker rule. Bank profitability was affected in all countries, showing up in lower equity returns.

This article studies the empirical relationship between firms’ asset growth and idiosyncratic stock return volatility. In the cross-section, firms’ idiosyncratic return volatility is V-shaped with respect to their lagged asset growth rates: the volatility is higher for firms with extreme (either high or low) asset growth rates than for firms with moderate growth rates. In the time series, a higher dispersion across firms in asset growth rates predicts a higher average idiosyncratic return volatility. Moreover, the dispersion in asset growth rates has the strongest time series predictive power among alternative explanations of the average idiosyncratic return volatility, such as cash flow volatility and growth options. These findings indicate the importance of nonlinearity in studying the cross-sectional return volatility and provide a new explanation of the idiosyncratic return volatility that is significant in both the cross-section and the time series.

Using simulations controlling for the ability to time the equity, bond, and money markets, we compare daily and monthly performance measures. Our main results highlight the joint importance of the fictitious timer’s trading frequency and the data sampling frequency for estimation. Specifically, daily timing measures are superior to those estimated monthly for daily timers, but inferior for occasional or monthly timers. Global measures show more robustness to differences in trading and data sampling frequencies. Finally, conditional measures do not improve upon unconditional ones, and results are similar for performance detection versus ranking.