A long-standing question in finance is why companies donate to charity, often attributing it to either managerial agency problems or strategic behavior. Based on a global sample of donation announcements by firms providing relief to disaster-affected communities, we test the relative importance of these two motives and the conditions under which each dominates. We exploit disaster-specific factors in an event study setting around corporate donation announcement dates to show that, on average, relief donations decrease returns. However, the strategic benefits of donating around salient events can mitigate these negative effects. To account for firms’ donation decisions, we rely on exogenous variation in the availability of corporate charitable funds due to the timing of disasters relative to firms’ financial years. We show that donations provide new information to the market and that negative returns are primarily driven by cash donations made via corporate foundations.

We present a new dynamic bank run model for liquidity risk where a financial institution finances its risky assets by a mixture of short- and long-term debt. The financial institution is exposed to insolvency risk at any time until maturity and to illiquidity risk at a finite number of rollover dates. We compute both insolvency and illiquidity default probabilities in this multiperiod setting using a structural credit risk model approach. Firesale rates can be determined endogenously as expected debt value over current asset value. Numerical results illustrate the impact of various input parameters on the default probabilities.

Hedge funds that endorse the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) underperform other hedge funds after adjusting for risk but attract greater investor flows, accumulate more assets, and harvest greater fee revenues. Consistent with an agency explanation, the underperformance is driven by PRI signatories with low environmental, social, and governance (ESG) exposures and is greater for hedge funds with poor incentive alignment. To address endogeneity, we exploit regulatory reforms that enhance stewardship and show that the ESG exposure and relative performance of signatory funds improve post reforms. Our findings suggest that some hedge funds endorse responsible investment to pander to investor preferences.

This paper documents the history of aggregate positions in US index options and investigates the driving factors behind use of this class of derivatives. We construct several measures of the magnitude of the market and characterize their level, trend, and covariates. Measured in terms of volatility exposure, the market is economically small, but it embeds a significant latent exposure to large price changes. Out-of-the-money puts are the dominant component of open positions. Variation in options use is well described by a stochastic trend driven by equity market activity and a significant negative response to increases in risk. Using a rich collection of uncertainty proxies, we distinguish distinct responses to exogenous macroeconomic risk, risk aversion, differences of opinion, and disaster risk. The results are consistent with the view that the primary function of index options is the transfer of unspanned crash risk.