Knowledge that Transforms

I use a life-cycle model of housing demand to infer expectations about house prices and home equity requirements for the housing boom of the 2000s from observed household choices. Expectations and credit constraints are separately identified from the intensive and extensive margins of housing demand. The main results are that (1) expected price growth was close to average long-run growth, (2) home equity requirements were lax initially, but tightened after the bust, and (3) subjective uncertainty about future price growth was large. Given the option to default on mortgage debt, greater price uncertainty leads to higher optimal household leverage.

We show that banks significantly underreport the risk in their trading book when they have lower equity capital. Specifically, a decrease in a bank’s equity capital results in substantially more violations of its self-reported risk levels in the following quarter. Underreporting is especially frequent during the critical periods of high systemic risk and for banks with larger trading operations. We exploit a discontinuity in the expected benefit of underreporting present in Basel regulations to provide further support for a causal link between capitalsaving incentives and underreporting. Overall, we show that banks’ self-reported risk measures become least informative precisely when they matter the most.

We quantify the gains from regulating maturity transformation in a model of banks that finance long-term assets with nontradable debt. Banks choose the amount and maturity of their debt by trading off investors’preferences for short maturities with the risk of systemic crises. Pecuniary externalities make unregulated debt maturities inefficiently short. In calibrating the model to eurozone banking data for 2006, we find that lengthening the average maturity of wholesale debt from 2.8 to 3.3 months would produce welfare gains with a present value of euro 105 billion, while the lengthening induced by the NSFR would be too drastic.

This paper proposes a two-country model that features time-varying heterogeneity in conditional risk aversion across countries, endogenously arising from the interaction between external habit formation and preference home bias. The model generates high international correlation of state prices along with modest cross-country consumption growth correlation and matches the empirical disconnect between exchange rate changes and consumption growth rate differentials. The key mechanism is endogenous time variation in conditional consumption growth volatility: the conditionally less risk averse country insures the more risk averse one, offsetting cross-country heterogeneity in conditional risk aversion and leading to significant international comovement in marginal utility growth. Received February 1, 2012; editorial decision April 19, 2016 by Editor Pietro Veronesi.

We introduce uncertainty into Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) to study optimal long-term contracting with learning. In a dynamic relationship, the agent's shirking not only reduces current performance, but also increases the agent's information rent due to the persistent belief manipulation effect. We characterize the optimal contract using the dynamic programming technique in which information rent is the unique state variable. In the optimal contract, the optimal effort is front-loaded and stochastically decreases over time. Furthermore, the optimal contract exhibits an option-like feature in that incentives increase after good performance. Implications about managerial incentives and asset management compensations are discussed.

Financial regulators and investors have expressed concerns about high pay inequality within firms. Using a proprietary data set of public and private firms, this paper shows that firms with higher pay inequality—relative wage differentials between top-and bottom-level jobs—are larger and have higher valuations and stronger operating performance. Moreover, firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns and greater earnings surprises, suggesting that pay inequality is not fully priced by the market. Our results support the notion that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent.

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry pay in one division generates spillovers on managerial pay in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only within the boundaries of a conglomerate. The intra-firm spillovers increase when conglomerates have excess cash and when managers have more influence over its distribution, but decline in the presence of strong governance. These spillovers are associated with weaker performance and lower firm value. Our evidence is consistent with simultaneous cross-subsidization via managerial compensation and capital budgets and suggests that these practices arise in similar firms.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began collecting transaction data from brokerdealers in 2011 as a step toward enhancing its understanding of securitization markets. We use transaction data to document the importance of the interdealer network structure to market quality. Some dealers are relatively central in the network and trade with many dealers, while others are peripheral. Core dealers receive relatively lower and less dispersed spreads than peripheral dealers. We develop a model in which core and peripheral dealers trade with different customer clienteles and argue that the presence of relatively sophisticated customers in securitization markets explains these facts.

This paper establishes a new empirical fact: Mutual funds' flow-performance sensitivity is a hump-shaped function of aggregate risk-factor realizations. Explanations based on extant theories can explain only a fraction of the pattern. We thus develop a new parsimonious model. It assumes Bayesian investors who are uncertain about the degree to which fund returns are exposed to systematic risk. Fund performance is then less informative about manager skill when factor realizations are larger in absolute value. The data also support the out-of-sample prediction that the hump shape is more pronounced for funds with more uncertain risk loadings.

This paper provides novel evidence on the real and financial market effects of legal institutions. Our analysis exploits persistent and externally imposed differences in court enforcement that arose when the U.S. Congress assigned state courts to adjudicate contracts on a subset of Native American reservations. Using area-specific data on small business lending, we find that reservations assigned to state courts, which enforce contracts more predictably than tribal courts, have stronger credit markets. Moreover, the law-driven component of credit market development is associated with significantly higher per capita income, with stronger effects in sectors that depend more on external financing.