Knowledge that Transforms

An arbitrageur with short investment horizon gains from accelerating price discovery by advertising his private information. However, advertising many assets may overload investors’ attention, reducing the number of informed traders per asset, and slowing price discovery. So the arbitrageur optimally concentrates advertising on just a few assets, unless his trades have significant price impact. The arbitrageur’s gain from advertising is increasing in the assets’ mispricing and in the precision of his private information, and is decreasing in its complexity. If several arbitrageurs have private information, inefficient equilibria can arise, where substantial mispricing persists or investors’ attention is overloaded.

We study whether institutional investors that sign the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), a commitment to responsible investing, exhibit better portfolio-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores. Signatories outside of the USA have superior ESG scores than nonsignatories, but US signatories have at best similar ESG ratings, and worse scores if they have underperformed recently, are retail-client facing, and joined the PRI late. US signatories do not improve the ESG scores of portfolio companies after investing in them. Commercial motives, uncertainty about fiduciary duties, and lower ESG market maturity explain why US-domiciled PRI signatories do not follow through on their responsible investment commitments.

We investigate the relationship between investor attention and financial market anomalies. We find that anomaly returns tend to be higher following high-attention days. The result is robust after controlling for the effect of news and in a natural experiment setting in which a stock market regulation and rounding errors generate exogenous variations in attention. An analysis of order imbalances suggests that large traders trade on anomaly signals more aggressively upon observing higher attention. We discuss the extent to which the findings are driven by inattention-driven underreaction, bias amplification, or coordinated arbitrage mechanisms, thereby providing insight into the understanding of anomalies.

We use Word2vec to develop a financial sentiment dictionary from 3.1 million Chinese-language financial news articles. Our dictionary maps semantically similar words to a subset of human-expert generated financial sentiment words. In validation tests, our dictionary scores the sentiment of articles consistently with human reading of full articles. In return association tests, our dictionary outperforms and subsumes previous Chinese financial sentiment dictionaries, such as direct translations of Loughran and McDonald’s (2011, Journal of Finance, 66, 35–65) English-language financial dictionary. We also generate a list of politically related positive words that is unique to China; we find that this list has a weaker association with returns than does the list of other positive words. We demonstrate that state media uses more politically related positive and fewer negative words, and exhibits a sentiment bias. This bias renders the state media’s sentiment as less return-informative. Our findings demonstrate that dictionary-based sentiment analysis exhibits strong language and domain specificity.

This paper studies how anticipated disagreement between a financier and an entrepreneur affects optimal contracting and asset prices. The value of debt is uniquely immune to anticipated disagreement, and when the set of anticipated disagreements is sufficiently rich, this immunity causes the optimal contract to give the financier debt. In contrast, the values of other contracts, including equity, decline as anticipated disagreement becomes more severe. This suggests a channel through which an increase in the severity of anticipated disagreement increases the equity premium and the debt-to-equity ratio.

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.

Elementary portfolio theory implies that environmentalists optimally hold more shares of polluting firms than non-environmentalists, and that polluting firms attract more investment capital than otherwise identical non-polluting firms through a hedging channel. Pigouvian taxation can reverse the aggregate investment results, but environmentalists still overweight polluters. We introduce countervailing motives for environmentalists to underweight polluters, comparing the implications when environmentalists coordinate to internalize pollution, or have nonpecuniary disutility from holding polluter stock. With nonpecuniary disutility, introducing a green derivative may dramatically alter who invests most in polluters, but has no impact on aggregate pollution.

This article shows how sustainable investing—through the joint practice of exclusionary screening and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) integration—affects asset returns. I develop an asset pricing model with partial segmentation and heterogeneous preferences. I characterize two exclusion premia generalizing Merton’s (1987) premium on neglected stocks and a taste premium that clarifies the relationship between ESG and financial performance. Focusing on US stocks, I estimate the model by applying it to sin stocks as excluded assets and using the holdings of green funds to proxy for environmental integration. The average annual exclusion effect is 2.79% for the period 1999–2019. Although the annual taste effect ranges from –1.12% to + 0.14% across industries for 2007–19, the taste effect spread between the top and bottom terciles of companies within each industry can exceed 2% per year. Finally, I estimate and explain the dynamics of these premia.

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 quantify the importance to mutual fund flows of affiliation between funds and their distributors. Bank failures create exogenous variation in retail customers’ exposure to bank-affiliated mutual funds. When a bank fails, its customers are moved to other banks that distribute their own affiliated mutual funds. Following such exogeneous bank shifts, customers sell their fund holdings and replace them with funds affiliated with their new banks. Customers react sequentially over time. After 4 years, a third of customers’ investments have been reallocated. In spite of large reallocations, investors do not end up with better-performing fund portfolios.