Knowledge that Transforms

We first study a stylized model of self-fulfilling panic among agents with differing fragilities to strategic risk and show that depending on the severity of coordination problems, the panic trigger threshold can depend only on one type's fragility. We then present a model of systemic panic among financial institutions with heterogeneous fragilities to financial spillovers. Concerns about potential spillovers generate strategic interaction, triggering a pre-emption game in which one tries to exit the market before others to avoid spillovers. Although financial contagion originates in weaker institutions, systemic risk can critically depend on financial health of stronger in the contagion chain. In this case, bolstering the strong, rather than the weak, more effectively enhances systemic stability.

Dark pools are equity trading systems that do not publicly display orders. Dark pools offer potential price improvements but do not guarantee execution. Informed traders tend to trade in the same direction, crowd on the heavy side of the market, and face a higher execution risk in the dark pool, relative to uninformed traders. Consequently, exchanges are more attractive to informed traders, and dark pools are more attractive to uninformed traders. Under certain conditions, adding a dark pool alongside an exchange concentrates price-relevant information into the exchange and improves price discovery. Improved price discovery coincides with reduced exchange liquidity.

Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth, and financial stability. Yet our understanding of the determinants of financial decision making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both standard and two-sample instrumental variable strategies, we show that education increases financial market participation, measured by investment income and equities ownership, while dramatically reducing the probability that an individual declares bankruptcy, experiences a foreclosure, or is delinquent on a loan. Further results and a simple calibration suggest that the result is driven by changes in savings or investment behavior, rather than simply increased labor earnings.

Relying on 2.2 million articles from forty-five national and local U.S. newspapers between 1989 and 2010, we find that firms particularly covered by the media exhibit, ceteris paribus, significantly stronger momentum. The effect depends on article tone, reverses in the long run, is more pronounced for stocks with high uncertainty, and is stronger in states with high investor individualism. Our findings suggest that media coverage can exacerbate investor biases, leading return predictability to be strongest for firms in the spotlight of public attention. These results collectively lend credibility to an overreaction-based explanation for the momentum effect.

As illustrated in the tale of “the dog that did not bark,” the absence of news and the passage of time often contain information. We test whether markets fully incorporate this information using the empirical context of mergers. During the year after merger announcement, the passage of time is informative about the probability that the merger will ultimately complete. We show that the variation in hazard rates of completion after announcement strongly predicts returns. This pattern is consistent with a behavioral model of underreaction to the passage of time and cannot be explained by changes in risk or frictions.

At year-end, some allege that institutional investors try to mislead investors by placing trades that inflate performance (portfolio pumping) or distort reported holdings (window dressing). We contribute direct tests using daily institutional trades and find that year-end price inflation derives from a lack of institutional selling rather than institutional buying. In fact, institutional buying declines at year-end. Consistent with pumping, institutions tend to buy stocks in which they already have large positions. We find no evidence of window dressing, as institutions are not more likely to buy high-past return stocks or sell low-past return stocks at year- or quarter-end.

This paper studies the implications of opacity in financial markets for investor behavior, asset prices, and welfare. Transparent funds (e.g., mutual funds) and opaque funds (e.g., hedge funds) trade transparent assets (e.g., plain-vanilla products) and opaque assets (e.g., structured products). Investors observe neither opaque funds' portfolios nor opaque assets' payoffs. Consistent with empirical observations, an “opacity price premium” arises: opaque assets trade at a premium over transparent ones despite identical payoffs. This accompanies endogenous market segmentation: transparent (opaque) funds trade only transparent (opaque) assets. The opacity price premium incentivizes financial engineers to render transparent assets opaque deliberately.

We investigate the effect of shareholder activism on debtholders by examining a sample of bank loans for firms targeted by activist hedge funds. We compare loan spreads before and after intervention and show the effects of heterogeneous shareholder actions. Spreads increase when shareholder activism relies on the market for corporate control or financial restructuring. In contrast, spreads decrease when activists address managerial entrenchment. Furthermore, the effects are more pronounced when pre-existing governance mechanisms are weak. Our findings suggest that shareholder activism does not necessarily exacerbate bondholder-shareholder conflicts of interest and highlight the role of activism in aligning investors.

Why do security analysts issue overly positive recommendations? We propose a novel approach to distinguish strategic motives (e.g., generating small-investor purchases and pleasing management) from nonstrategic motives (genuine overoptimism). We argue that nonstrategic distorters tend to issue both positive recommendations and optimistic forecasts, while strategic distorters "speak in two tongues," issuing overly positive recommendations but less optimistic forecasts. We show that the incidence of strategic distortion is large and systematically related to proxies for incentive misalignment. Our "two-tongues metric" reveals strategic distortion beyond those indicators and provides a new tool for detecting incentives to distort that are hard to identify otherwise.

We test a frog-in-the-pan (FIP) hypothesis that predicts investors are inattentive to information arriving continuously in small amounts. Intuitively, we hypothesize that a series of frequent gradual changes attracts less attention than infrequent dramatic changes. Consistent with the FIP hypothesis, we find that continuous information induces strong persistent return continuation that does not reverse in the long run. Momentum decreases monotonically from 5.94% for stocks with continuous information during their formation period to −2.07% for stocks with discrete information but similar cumulative formation-period returns. Higher media coverage coincides with discrete information and mitigates the stronger momentum following continuous information.