Knowledge that Transforms

When assessing a fund manager's skill, sophisticated investors will consider all factors (priced and unpriced) that explain cross-sectional variation in fund performance. We investigate which factors investors attend to by analyzing mutual fund flows as a function of recent returns decomposed into alpha and factor-related returns. Surprisingly, investors attend most to market risk (beta) when evaluating funds and treat returns attributable to size, value, momentum, and industry factors as alpha. Using proxies for investor sophistication (wealth, distribution channels, and periods of high investor sentiment), we find that more sophisticated investors use more sophisticated benchmarks when evaluating fund performance.

We study how relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the business cycle. We develop a model in which relationship banks gather information on their borrowers, allowing them to provide loans to profitable firms during a crisis. Because of the services they provide, operating costs of relationship banks are higher than those of transaction banks. Relationship banks charge a higher intermediation spread in normal times, but offer continuation lending at more favourable terms than transaction banks to profitable firms in a crisis. Using credit register information for Italian banks before and after the Lehman Brothers’ default, we test the theoretical predictions of the model.

Financial constraints are fundamental to empirical research in finance and economics. We propose two tests to evaluate how well measures of financial constraints actually capture constraints. We find that firms typically classified as constrained do not actually behave as if they were constrained: they have no trouble raising debt when their demand for debt increases exogenously and use the proceeds of equity issues to increase payouts to shareholders. Our evidence suggests that extant findings that have been attributed to constraints may instead reflect differences in the growth and financing policies of firms at different stages of their life cycles.

We examine the dynamics of assets under management (AUM) and management fees at the portfolio manager level in the closed-end fund industry. We find that managers capitalize on good past performance and favorable investor perceptions about future performance, as reflected in fund premiums, through AUM expansions and fee increases. However, the penalties for poor performance or unfavorable investor perceptions are either insignificant, or substantially mitigated by manager tenure. Long tenure is generally associated with poor performance and high discounts. Our findings suggest substantial managerial power in capturing CEF rents. We also document significant diseconomies of scale at the manager level.

We study feedback from the risk of outstanding mortgage-backed securities (MBS) on the level and volatility of interest rates. We incorporate supply shocks resulting from changes in MBS duration into a parsimonious equilibrium dynamic term structure model and derive three predictions that are strongly supported in the data: (1) MBS duration positively predicts nominal and real excess bond returns, especially for longer maturities; (2) the predictive power of MBS duration is transitory in nature; and (3) MBS convexity increases interest rate volatility, and this effect has a hump-shaped term structure.

We outline a dividend signaling model that features investors who are averse to dividend cuts. Managers with strong unobservable cash earnings pay high dividends but retain enough to be likely not to fall short next period. The model is consistent with a Lintner partialadjustment model, modal dividend changes of zero, stronger market reactions to dividend cuts than increases, comparatively infrequent and irregular repurchases, and a mechanism that does not depend on public destruction of value, which managers reject in surveys. New tests involve stronger reactions to changes from longer-maintained dividend levels and reference point currencies of American Depository Receipt dividends.

Most informal finance comes from family and friends. Existing informal finance theories cannot match two characteristics of family finance: family investors may accept belowmarket or even negative returns, yet borrowers often prefer formal finance. We argue that social preferences make family finance cheap but create shadow costs that nonetheless discourage its use: Committing family funds to risky investment displaces intrafamily insurance and undermines limited liability. The same characteristics that sustain familial insurance thus render family finance a poor source of risk capital. Even when overcoming capital constraints requires social ties, intermediation and semiformalization may therefore be crucial for promoting risk taking.

This paper examines the contribution of out-of-town second-house buyers to mispricing in the housing market. We show that demand from out-of-town second-house buyers during the mid 2000s predicted not only house-price appreciation rates but also impliedto-actual-rent-ratio appreciation rates, a proxy for mispricing. We then apply a novel identification strategy to address the issue of reverse causality. We give supporting evidence that out-of-town second-house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators, earning lower capital gains (misinformed) and consuming smaller dividends (speculators).

Did regulatory reforms that lowered barriers to competition increase or decrease the quality of information that banks disclose to the public? By integrating the gravity model of investment with the state-specific process of bank deregulation that occurred in the United States from the 1980s through the 1990s, we develop a bank-specific, time-varying measure of deregulation-induced competition. We find that an intensification of competition reduced abnormal accruals of loan loss provisions and the frequency with which banks restate financial statements. The results suggest that competition reduces bank opacity, potentially enhancing the ability of markets to monitor banks.

The Review of Financial Studies has among its missions the facilitation and promotion of a vigorous academic debate across unsettled questions in finance. This special section of Volume 29, Number 1 consists of three studies on the cross-section of expected returns. To what extent are our inferences about certain anomalous patterns in the cross-section of expected returns related to biases and inefficiencies in our testing procedures? Are all factor discoveries equally important? Do some proposed factors subsume the explanatory power of others? Is the after-trading-cost performance of some anomalies more resilient than that of others?