Knowledge that Transforms

We study a market for funding real investment where valuation—meaning investors devoting resources to acquiring information about future payoffs—creates an adverse selection problem. Unlike previous models, more valuation is associated with lower market prices and so greater returns to valuation. This strategic complementarity in the capacity to do valuation generates multiple equilibria. With multiple equilibria, the equilibrium without valuation is most efficient despite funding some unprofitable investments. Switches to valuation equilibria, valuation runs, look like credit crunches. A large investor can ensure the efficient equilibrium only if it can precommit to a price and potentially, only if subsidized.

We analyze an extensive proprietary database of corporate social responsibility engagements with U.S. public companies from 1999-2009. Engagements address environmental, social, and governance concerns. Successful (unsuccessful) engagements are followed by positive (zero) abnormal returns. Companies with inferior governance and socially conscious institutional investors are more likely to be engaged. Success in engagements is more probable if the engaged firm has reputational concerns and higher capacity to implement changes. Collaboration among activists is instrumental in increasing the success rate of environmental/social engagements. After successful engagements, particularly on environmental/social issues, companies experience improved accounting performance and governance and increased institutional ownership.

We study the role of information in asset-pricing models with long-run cash flow risk. When investors can distinguish short- from long-run consumption risks (full information), the model generates a sizable equity risk premium only if the equity term structure slopes up, contrary to the data. In general, the short- and long-run components are unidentified. We propose a sparsity-based bounded rationality model of long-run risk that is both parsimonious and fully identified from historical data. In contrast to full information, the model generates a sizable market risk premium simultaneously with a downward-sloping equity term structure, as in the data.

We hypothesize that individual investors treat trading as a fun and exciting gambling activity, implying substitution between this activity and alternative gambling opportunities. To examine this hypothesis, we study the lottery jackpots and the trading of individual investors in Taiwan. When the jackpots exceed 500 million Taiwan dollars, the trading volume decreases between 5.2% and 9.1% among stocks preferred by individual investors and between 6.8% and 8.6% among lottery-like stocks. The decline in individual buy volume is statistically indistinct from the decline in sell volume. Large jackpots are associated with less trading in options with high sensitivity to volatility.

This paper characterizes how firms' strategic interaction in product markets affects the industry dynamics of investment and expected returns. In imperfectly competitive industries, a firm's exposure to systematic risk is affected by both its own investment strategy and the investment strategies of its peers, so that the dynamics of its expected returns depend on the intraindustry value spread. In the model and the data, firms' betas and returns correlate more positively in industries with low value spread, low dispersion in operating markups, and low concentration.

We use daily Internet search volume from millions of households to reveal market-level sentiment. By aggregating the volume of queries related to household concerns (e.g., "recession," "unemployment," and "bankruptcy"), we construct a Financial and Economic Attitudes Revealed by Search (FEARS) index as a new measure of investor sentiment. Between 2004 and 2011, we find FEARS (i) predict short-term return reversals, (ii) predict temporary increases in volatility, and (iii) predict mutual fund flows out of equity funds and into bond funds. Taken together, the results are broadly consistent with theories of investor sentiment.

I document a new stylized fact about how investors trade assets: individuals are more likely to sell the extreme winning and extreme losing positions in their portfolio ("the rank effect"). This effect is not driven by firm-specific information, holding period or the level of returns itself, but is associated with the salience of extreme portfolio positions. The rank effect is exhibited by both retail traders and mutual fund managers. The effect indicates that trades in a given stock depend on how the stock compares to other positions in an investor's portfolio.

In housing markets, neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about neighborhood values than buyers are, but some sellers and buyers are better informed than their peers are. Consistent with predictions from a new framework for analyzing such markets with heterogeneous assets and differentially informed agents, we find that changes in the composition of sellers toward more informed sellers and sellers with a larger supply elasticity predict subsequent house price declines. This effect is larger for houses with more price exposure to neighborhood characteristics, and smaller for houses bought by buyers that are more informed.

The paper investigates the portfolio allocation effects of increased asset co-movements during market downturns. We develop a model for the stock price process that allows for increased and asymmetric dependence between extreme return realizations. We isolate the portfolio hedging demands that arise due to extreme co-movements and find a substantial shift of the portfolio holdings toward the risk-free asset. We demonstrate that accounting for dependence between extreme events in portfolio decisions leads to significant economic gains that stem primarily from intertemporal hedging motives. These findings are robust along alternative modeling assumptions of extreme co-movements and conditional correlation.

We hypothesize that short selling has a disciplining role vis-à-vis firm managers that forces them to reduce earnings management. Using firm-level short-selling data for thirty-three countries collected over a sample period from 2002 to 2009, we document a significantly negative relationship between the threat of short selling and earnings management. Tests based on instrumental variable and exogenous regulatory experiments offer evidence of a causal link between short selling and earnings management. Our findings suggest that short selling functions as an external governance mechanism to discipline managers.