Knowledge that Transforms

During the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), Chinese cities witnessed a paradox: residential land and new house prices surged while transaction volumes plummeted. We attribute this to local governments’ active price management through supply controls, land acquisitions by local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), and limits on new home sales permits. Cities more dependent on land sales and land-backed debt before the pandemic experienced greater price increases and price–volume divergence, with LGFVs buying more land at higher prices than other buyers. These interventions helped sustain fiscal financing but deepened developers’ financial distress, revealing unintended consequences of local governments’ fiscal strategies during downturns.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds have heterogeneous incentives to engage with portfolio firms. If funds view ESG as a value driver, then these incentives will affect funds’ behavior and thus their impact on firms. We compare ESG funds with similar levels of ESG investments but different incentives to engage. Funds with higher incentives to engage, that is, committed ESG funds, conduct more ESG-related information acquisition, pursue longer term investment strategies, engage more intensely on ESG issues, and have greater real impacts. Moreover, committed ESG funds have outperformed other ESG funds within subportfolios with higher and more effective ESG engagement.

We propose an equilibrium corporate bond pricing model that accommodates the heterogeneity in institutional investors’ preferences and mandates in an empirically tractable way. Our model, estimated on rich holdings data, quantifies investors’ preferences and demand elasticities, with inelastic insurers focusing on the investment-grade segment, and elastic mutual funds substituting across ratings groups. The model offers a novel quantitative perspective of the effect of recent trends in institutional ownership on equilibrium credit spreads and the funding costs of corporations. Overall, our model emphasizes the composition of institutional demand as an important state variable for corporate bond pricing.

This paper investigates the impact of introducing junior unsecured loans (i.e., FinTech loans) into the small business lending market. Using French administrative data, we find that firms experience a 13% increase in bank credit after receiving a FinTech loan. We use propensity score matching procedures and a shift-share instrument to account for credit demand. The credit increase only occurs when FinTech borrowers invest in new assets, and Fintech borrowers are subsequently more likely to pledge collateral to banks. This suggests that firms use FinTech loans to acquire assets that they then pledge to banks, thereby increasing total borrowing capacity.

We measure popular sentiment toward finance by applying a large language model to millions of books published in eight countries over hundreds of years. We extensively validate this measure both internally and externally. We document persistent differences in finance sentiment across countries despite ample time-series variation. Books written in the languages of more capitalist countries discuss finance in a more positive context. Finance sentiment is correlated with survey-based measures of financial market participation and income inequality. Finance sentiment declines one year before rather than after financial crises. Positive shocks to finance sentiment are followed by higher output and credit growth.

We conduct the first large-scale study of how different stakeholder groups assess corporate culture and quantify the economic implications of those differences. We employ generative AI to analyze analyst reports, call transcripts, and employee reviews, and organize the extracted information into a knowledge graph that links a culture type to its perceived causes and effects. We demonstrate that the divergence in different stakeholder groups' assessment of culture aligns with their distinct roles and economic incentives. Moreover, we show that analysts' culture analyses are incorporated into stock recommendations and target prices, and investors react to divergence in stakeholders' assessment of culture.

Rapid credit expansions predict lower output growth and banking crises, but does it matter who finances them? We identify the ultimate counterparties financing credit expansions in a panel of 33 advanced economies and find that foreign-financed household credit expansions predict lower GDP growth and higher crisis risk, but domestically financed credit expansions do not. Studying the mechanisms, we find that foreign-financed household credit expansions are accompanied by higher supply of foreign capital (reflected in low credit spreads), are followed by elevated credit cycle reversal risk, and lead to higher debt service payments to foreigners which depress aggregate demand.

We extract information about future economic conditions from firms’ cross-border merger and acquisition announcements, and show it predicts changes in relative economic growth rates and foreign exchange rate returns. We find the predictability is driven by the acquisition decisions of domestic firms, which signal turning points in local economic growth. The findings are motivated by a simple model of exchange rate determination with heterogeneous expectations and support the theorized relationship between foreign exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals. The results provide new tools for policy makers seeking to predict economic activity and offer global investors a novel source of portfolio diversification.

Liquidity provision is often attributed to debt-issuing intermediaries like banks. We develop a unified theoretical framework and empirically show that mutual funds issuing demandable equity also provide an economically significant amount of liquidity by insuring against idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. Quantitatively, bond funds provide 12.5% of the liquidity that banks provide per dollar. Our model further shows that when equity values incorporate the liquidation cost from redemptions, as in swing pricing, liquidity provision is not necessarily reduced. This is because swing pricing may increase funds’ capacity for holding illiquid assets without inducing panic runs.

We theoretically and empirically show how the reuse of Treasury securities as collateral alleviates safe asset scarcity. Our model characterizes how reuse allows intermediaries to efficiently reallocate the safety benefits of long-term Treasury securities to a broader investor base. By reusing Treasury securities, intermediaries can access more collateral to create safe assets without interest rate risk. When the demand for safe assets is high, intermediaries increase reuse, distributing safe asset benefits to investors that value safety the most. Using supervisory data to calculate a dealer-level measure of reuse called the “collateral multiplier,” we empirically confirm the model’s main predictions.