Knowledge that Transforms

We study how government control affects the roles of the media as an information intermediary and a corporate monitor. Comparing a large sample of news articles written by state-controlled and market-oriented Chinese media, we find that articles by the market-oriented media are more critical, more accurate, more comprehensive, and timelier than those by the state-controlled media. Moreover, only articles by the market-oriented media have a significant corporate governance impact. Subsample analyses, interviews with journalists, and a survey of university students suggest that the market-oriented media’s superior effects are explained by their operating efficiency and independence.

What is the driving force behind the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies? What is the relation between firms’ job-creation incentives and stock market valuations? We answer these questions in a model with time-varying risk, modeled as a small and variable probability of an economic disaster. A high probability implies greater risk and lower future growth, lowering the incentives of firms to invest in hiring. During periods of high risk, stock market valuations are low and unemployment rises. The model thus explains volatility in equity and labor markets, and the relation between the two. Received May 12, 2016; editorial decision October 26, 2017 by Editor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. Authors have furnished data, which are available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Using an unexpected government regulation that restricted the ability of micro-finance institutions to recover loans in one Indian state, we examine whether this intervention impacted bank loan performance. The bank loan delinquency rate increased significantly as a result. In response, the ex-post bank credit supply declined by more than half. For identification, we compare loans from branches located in regions subject to this intervention with loans from nearby branches of the same bank located in regions not subject to the intervention. We conclude that political interventions in credit markets could have significant spillover effects.

Prices of the highly liquid S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (SPY) and the E-mini future (ES) respond to macroeconomic announcement surprises within five milliseconds, with trading intensity increasing over 100-fold following the news release. However, profits from trading quickly are relatively small, roughly $$$19,000 ($$$50,000) per event for SPY (ES). Although the speed of information incorporation has increased in recent years, profits have not. Order flow has become less informative, consistent with prices responding directly to news rather than indirectly through trading. Our evidence indicates that low-latency liquidity demanders do not benefit materially from short-term monopolistic access to information. Received April 18, 2017; editorial decision November 4, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We build a comparable and bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply for 1,114 CEOs and investigate whether family and professional CEOs differ along this dimension. Family CEOs work 9% fewer hours relative to professional CEOs. CEO hours worked are positively correlated with firm performance and account for 18% of the performance gap between family and professional CEOs. We study the sources of the differences in labor supply across family and professional CEOs by exploiting firm and industry heterogeneity and variation in meteorological and sports events. Evidence suggests that family CEOs value or can pursue leisure activities more so than professional CEOs.

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high-cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2007. Controlling for credit score and other risk factors, AfricanAmerican and Hispanic borrowers are 103% and 78% more likely to receive high-cost mortgages for home purchases. Alarge part of the increase is attributable to sorting across lenders (55%-65%), and this, in turn, can be largely accounted for by the lender’s ex post foreclosure risk. The remaining within-lender differences are also concentrated in high-risk lenders, revealing the central role of these institutions in explaining market-wide racial and ethnic differences.

Analyzing the period 1988–2006, we document that banks that are active in strong housing markets increase mortgage lending and decrease commercial lending. Firms that borrow from these banks have significantly lower investment. This is especially pronounced for firms that are more capital constrained or borrow from more-constrained banks. Various extensions and robustness analyses are consistent with the interpretation that commercial loans were crowded out by banks responding to profitable opportunities in mortgage lending, rather than with a demand-based interpretation. The results suggest that housing prices appreciations have negative spillovers to the real economy, which were overlooked thus far. Received November 29, 2016; editorial decision January 12, 2018 by Editor David Hirshleifer. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web Site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Based on high-frequency data for more than fifty commodities, currencies, equity indices, and fixed-income instruments spanning more than two decades, we document strong similarities in realized volatility patterns within and across asset classes. Exploiting these similarities through panel-based estimation of new realized volatility models results in superior out-of-sample risk forecasts, compared to forecasts from existing models and conventional procedures that do not incorporate the similarities in volatilities. We develop a utility-based framework for evaluating risk models that shows significant economic gains from our new risk model. Lastly, we evaluate the effects of transaction costs and trading speed in implementing different risk models.Received March 7, 2016; editorial decision February 3, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We revisit evidence of real effects of uncertainty shocks in the context of interest rate uncertainty. We document that adverse movements in interest rate uncertainty predict significant slowdowns in real activity, both at the aggregate and at the firm levels. To understand how firms cope with interest rate uncertainty, we develop a dynamic model of corporate investment, financing, and risk management and test it using a rich data set on corporate swap usage. We find that interest rate uncertainty depresses financially constrained firms’ investments in spite of hedging opportunities, because risk management by means of swaps is effectively risky. Received December 11, 2016; editorial decision January 26, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web Site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We study market segmentation effects using data on U.S. railroads that list their bonds in New York and London between 1873 and 1913. This sample provides a unique setting for such analysis because of the precision offered by bond yields in cost of capital estimation, the geography-specific nature of railroad assets, and ongoing substantial technological change. We document a significant reduction in market segmentation over time. While New York bond yields exceeded those in London in the 1870s, this premium disappeared by the early 1900s. However, the segmentation premium persisted in the more remote regions of the United States. Received June 18, 2015; editorial decision October 4, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood.