Knowledge that Transforms

Unionized workers are entitled to special treatment in bankruptcy court that can be detrimental to other corporate stakeholders, with unsecured creditors standing to lose the most. Using data on union elections, we employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of worker unionization on bondholders in bankruptcy states. Closely won union elections lead to significant bond value losses, especially when firms approach bankruptcy, have underfunded pension plans, and operate in non-RTW law states. Unionization is associated with longer, more convoluted, and costlier bankruptcy court proceedings. Unions depress bondholders’ recovery values as they are assigned seats on creditors’ committees.

We provide evidence that open-end organizational structures undermine incentives for asset managers to attack long-term mispricing. We compare open-end funds with closed-end funds. Closed-end funds purchase more underpriced stocks than do open-end funds, especially if the stocks involve high arbitrage risk. We then show that hedge funds with high share restrictions having a lower degree of open-endedness also trade against longterm mispricing to a larger extent than do other hedge funds. Our analysis suggests that open-end organizational structures are not conducive to long-term risky arbitrage.

We examine product differentiation in the high-frequency trading (HFT) industry, where the “products” are secretive proprietary trading strategies. We demonstrate how principal component analysis can be used to detect underlying strategies common to multiple HFT firms and show that there are three product categories with distinct attributes. We study how HFT competition in each product category affects the market environment and present evidence that indicates how it influences the short-horizon volatility of stocks as well as the viability of trading venues. Received October 10, 2016; editorial decision September 30, 2017 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.

This paper uses new data from the PSID to quantify the relative importance of negative equity versus ability to pay, in driving mortgage defaults between 2009 and 2013. These data allow us to construct household budgets sets that provide better measures of ability to pay. Changes in ability to pay have large estimated effects. Job loss has an equivalent effect on the propensity to default as a 35% decline in equity. Strategic motives are also found to be quantitatively important, as we estimate more than 38% of households in default could make their mortgage payments without reducing consumption.

We propose and estimate a model of endogenous informed trading that is a hybrid of the PIN and Kyle models. When an informed trader trades optimally, both returns and order flows are needed to identify information asymmetry parameters. Empirical relationships between parameter estimates and price impacts and between parameter estimates and stochastic volatility are consistent with theory. We illustrate how the estimates can be used to detect information events in the time series and to characterize the information content of prices in the cross-section. We also compare the estimates to those from other models on various criteria. Received April 5, 2017; editorial decision September 21, 2017 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.

This paper explores the dynamics of unsecured credit supply over the recent credit cycle and around the passage of the CARD Act. We examine a unique data set of over 200,000 credit card mail solicitations to a representative sample of households and introduce credit card offers as a direct, informative measure of supply of such credit. Contrasting personal credit card offer dynamics before and after the passage of the CARD Act with those of personal loans, auto loans, and corporate credit cards, we find that lenders reduced credit supply of personal credit cards to nonprime borrowers in response to the CARD Act. Our analysis highlights the importance of separately examining supply and demand responses to assess the unintended consequences of regulation.

In their foreign portfolio allocations, international mutual funds overweight industries that are comparatively large in their domestic stock market. Aggregate excess foreign industry allocations are sizeable, on average amounting to over 100% for the largest domestic industries. While this foreign industry bias partly reflects familiarity-based motives, a large body of evidence on investment and performance patterns is, on the whole, remarkably consistent with a specialized learning motive contributing to the bias. This suggests that differences in industry structures across domestic stock markets proxy for international information asymmetries.

We propose that innovative originality is a valuable organizational resource and that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, greater innovative originality may be undervalued. We find that firms' innovative originality strongly predicts higher, more persistent, and less volatile profitability and higher abnormal stock returns, findings that are robust to extensive controls. The return predictive power of innovative originality is stronger for firms with higher valuation uncertainty, lower investor attention, and greater sensitivity of future profitability to innovative originality. This evidence suggests that innovative originality acts as a "competitive moat" and is undervalued by the market.

We assess the finite sample performance of simulation estimators that are used to estimate the parameters of dynamic corporate finance models. We formulate an external validity specification test and propose a new set of statistical benchmarks that can be used to estimate and evaluate these models. These benchmarks are based on model policy functions. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that the estimators are largely unbiased with low root mean squared errors. When computed with an optimal weight matrix, the specification tests associated with the estimators are close to correctly sized. These tests have excellent power to detect misspecification.

We study the effects of stock market volatility on risk-taking and financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning up to 211 years and across 60 countries. Prolonged periods of low volatility have strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power over the incidence of banking crises and can be used as a reliable crisis indicator, whereas volatility itself does not predict crises. Low volatility leads to excessive credit buildups and balance sheet leverage in the financial system, indicating that agents take more risk in periods of low risk, supporting the dictum that “stability is destabilizing.” Received October 28, 2016; editorial decision February 7, 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.