Knowledge that Transforms

In empirically exploring the link between funding liquidity and market liquidity, the greatest challenge is to designate a suitable market that shows such linkages. In this respect, the 15-year Japanese floating (JF)-rate bond market, characterized by the lack of diversity among highly leveraged trading strategies, is an ideal case for investigation. A clean measure of market liquidity, liquidity discount rate (LDR), is estimated from JF prices and the LDR is found to be intertwined with funding liquidity only during the crisis. The deterioration of funding liquidity precedes that of the LDR, thus providing evidence of the outbreak of liquidity spiral.

Most empirical studies suggest that mutual funds do not persistently outperform an appropriate benchmark in the long run. We analyze this lack of persistence in terms of two equilibrating mechanisms: fund flows and manager changes. Using data on actively managed US equity mutual funds, we find that if neither mechanism is operating, winner funds (top-decile ranked in previous year) continue to significantly outperform loser funds (bottom-decile ranked in previous year) by 4.08 percentage points per annum. However, the difference between previous winner and loser funds declines to zero within one year if the two mechanisms are acting together. Thus, equity mutual fund out- and underperformance are unlikely to persist in well-functioning financial markets.

We derive closed-form solutions for asset prices and portfolio holdings when agents have asset-specific information and/or information about common components that affect many assets. Our solutions are general, encompass existing information structures, and are used to analyze new structures. A given investor’s portfolio can exhibit highly disperse holdings—e.g., portfolio weights may vary significantly from market capitalization weights. Our model also generates large ranges of asset prices due to information asymmetries. We help explain why US investors (e.g.) may underweight German stocks (e.g.) on average, but overweight a particular German stock relative to its market capitalization weight.

At the end of 2013, the share of domestic government debt held by the banking sectors of Eurozone countries was more than twice the amount held in 2007. We show that these increased bond holdings generated a crowding out of corporate lending. We find that the corporate loan supply was depressed by domestic sovereign bonds exclusively during the crisis period (2010–11). The crowding-out pattern holds across firms with different relationship banks within a given country. These findings suggest that sovereign bond holdings negatively impact private capital formation and reflect financial repression. We show that direct government ownership, as well as government influence through banks’ boards of directors, is among the channels used to influence banks.

Asset portfolios of open-end mutual funds reflect both the fund flows from ultimate investors as well as discretionary trading by the fund managers. We propose a method for decomposing the change in mutual fund asset holdings into the parts due to investor flows, fund manager discretionary sales, and valuation effects. We find that discretionary sales tend to reinforce the sales due to investor redemptions. We also find that 100 dollars’ worth of bond sales is associated with around 4 dollars’ worth of valuation losses. Finally, we show that a one percentage point increase in emerging market economy (EME) bond yields is associated with a 9−10% decline in the dollar value of EME bond fund holdings.

This paper explores how league tables, which are rankings based on market shares, influence the mergers and acquisitions market. A bank’s league table rank predicts its future deal flow, above and beyond other determinants. This creates incentives for banks to manage their league table ranks. League table management tools include selling fairness opinions (FOs) and reducing fees. Banks use such tools mostly when their incentives to do so are high: when a transaction affects their league table position or when they lost ranks in recent league tables. League table management seems to affect the quality of FOs.

We use our survey of finance professors from universities across the USA to investigate whether men and women react differently to prior gains and losses. We find that after incurring a loss, a large fraction of men continue to invest in stocks, but a majority of women tend to avoid investing in stocks. Even though prior losses increase the expectation of unfavorable market conditions, we find that women are more likely than men to expect unfavorable market conditions irrespective of whether they have made a gain or a loss in their prior stock market investments.

Using a dynamic model of financing, investment, and macroeconomic risk, we investigate when firms sell assets to fund investments (financing asset sales) across the business cycle. Equity financed investment transfers wealth from equity to debt because asset volatility declines and earnings increase when firms invest. Financing asset sales reduce asset collateral and, hence, transfer wealth back from debt to equity. Exploring the dynamics of the heretofore overlooked “asset sale versus external equity” financing margin across business cycles helps explain novel stylized facts about asset sales and their business cycle patterns that cannot be rationalized by traditional motives for selling assets.

We develop a simple yet realistic framework to analyze the impact of an exogenous shock on a bank’s balance-sheet and its optimal response when it is constrained to maintain its risk-based capital ratio above a regulatory threshold. We show that in a stress scenario, capital requirements may force the bank to shrink the size of its assets and we exhibit the bank’s optimal strategy as a function of regulatory risk-weights, asset market liquidity, and shock size. When financial markets are perfectly competitive, we show that the bank is always able to restore its capital ratio above the required one. However, for banks constrained to sell their loans at a discount and/or with a positive price impact when selling their marketable assets (large banks) we exhibit situations in which the deleveraging process generates a death spiral. We then show how to calibrate our model using annual reports of banks and study in detail the case of the French bank BNP Paribas. Finally, we suggest how our simple framework can be used to design a systemic capital surcharge.

We document evidence consistent with retail traders in the Forex market attributing random success to their own skill and, as a consequence, increasing risk taking. Although past performance does not predict future success for these traders, traders increase trade sizes, trade size variability, and number of trades with gains, and less with losses. There is a large discontinuity in all of these trading variables around zero past week returns: e.g., traders increase their trade size dramatically following winning weeks, relative to losing weeks. The effects are stronger for novice traders, consistent with more intense “learning” in early trading periods.