Knowledge that Transforms

Academics responded to the challenges posed by the 2008 financial crisis with a flurry of studies. This collection of articles is just the academic community's first look into it. The articles begin with an examination at the last national housing price crash: the great depression of the 1930s. This is followed by articles looking at the current mortgage market and how it behaved. Did modern innovations reflect or add to the downturn? The next set of papers examines how non-financial firms were impacted by the crash. To what degree did credit worthy firms nevertheless find themselves without access to capital? The papers then end with a look into how the banking sector itself fared throughout this period.

We study games in which the decision to exercise an option is a signal of private information to outsiders, whose beliefs affect the utility of the decision-maker. Signaling incentives distort the timing of exercise, and the direction of distortion depends on whether the decision-maker's utility increases or decreases in outsiders' belief about the payoff from exercise. In the former case, signaling incentives erode the value of the option to wait and speed up option exercise, while in the latter case option exercise is delayed. We demonstrate the model's implications through four corporate finance settings: investment under managerial myopia, venture capital grandstanding, investment under cash flow diversion, and product market competition.

We develop a simple robust link between deep out-of-the-money American put options on a company's stock and a credit insurance contract on the company's bond. We assume that the stock price stays above a barrier B before default but drops below a lower barrier A after default, thus generating a default corridor [A,B] that the stock price can never enter. Given the presence of this default corridor, a spread between two co-terminal American put options struck within the corridor replicates a pure credit contract, paying off when and only when default occurs prior to the option expiry.

We use loan-level data from the New York City metropolitan area to examine the extent to which lenders attempted to prevent foreclosures with concessionary modifications during the Great Depression. We find no principal forgiveness in the sample and only a handful of concessionary mortgage modifications of other types. Far more mortgages terminated through foreclosure than received any sort of concessionary modification. The results indicate that there are significant impediments to renegotiation of residential mortgages beyond securitization. As such, less renegotiation seems unlikely to be a major cost of securitization of residential mortgages. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We study information sales in financial markets with strategic risk-averse traders. The optimal selling mechanism is one of the following two: (i) sell to as many agents as possible very imprecise information; (ii) sell to a small number of agents information as precise as possible. As risk-sharing considerations prevail over the negative effects of competition, the newsletters or rumors associated with (i) dominate the exclusivity contract in (ii). These allocations of information have implications for price informativeness and trading volume, and thus we suggest a direct link between properties of asset prices and financial intermediation. Moreover, as more information is sold when the externality in its valuation is relatively less intense, we find a ranking reversal of the informational content of prices between (a) market structures (market-orders vs. limit-orders); and (b) models of traders' behavior (imperfect vs. perfect competition).

We examine how experience affects the decisions of individual investors and institutions in IPO auctions to bid in subsequent auctions, and their bidding returns. We track bidding histories for all 31, 476 individual investors and 1, 232 institutional investors across all 84 IPO auctions during the period from 1995 to 2000 in Taiwan. For individual bidders, (1) high returns in previous IPO auctions increase the likelihood of participating in future auctions; (2) bidders' returns decrease as they participate in more auctions; (3) auction selection ability deteriorates with experience; and (4) those with greater experience bid more aggressively. These findings are consistent with naïve reinforcement learning wherein individuals become unduly optimistic after receiving good returns. In sharp contrast, there is little sign that institutional investors exhibit such behavior. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

Using a unique dataset of trades and limit orders for S&P 500 futures, we decompose the aggregate risk into a component driven by the impact of net market orders and a component unrelated to net orders. The first component—flow-driven risk—is large, accounting for approximately 50% of market variance, and it is not transient. This risk represents the joint effect of net trade demand and the price impact of that demand—i.e., illiquidity. We find that flows are largely unpredictable, and lagged flows have no price impact. Flow-driven risk is time varying because price impact is highly variable. Illiquidity rises with market volatility, but not with flow uncertainty. Net selling increases illiquidity, which amplifies downside flow-driven risk. The findings are consistent with flow-driven shocks resulting from fluctuations in aggregate risk-bearing capacity. Under this interpretation, investors with constant risk tolerance should trade against such shocks (i.e., “supply liquidity”) to achieve substantial utility gains. Quantitatively accounting for the scale of flow-driven risk poses a major challenge for asset pricing theory.

Should capital cost calculations be based on a global or local market benchmark? The December 2000 redefinition of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) global equity index was a natural experiment addressing this question. It is argued that this event triggered a portfolio shift (by index funds) large enough to affect the residual asset supplies constituting the global and local market benchmarks of all actively managed capital. Changes in the market benchmarks imply distinct and predictable changes to global and local stock betas. Exploring whether global or local beta changes best explain the cross-section of event returns reveals that stocks in developed markets are priced globally and not locally. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We investigate whether the adverse effects of investors' behavioral biases extend beyond the domain of financial markets to the broad macro-economy. Focusing on the income risk-sharing role of financial markets, we find that risk sharing is higher (more than double) in U.S. states where investors are more sophisticated and exhibit weaker behavioral biases. The potential for risk sharing varies geographically, but states with better risk-sharing opportunities are able to achieve higher levels of risk sharing only when investors in those states are more sophisticated. Collectively, these results indicate that investors' aggregate behavioral biases and their lack of financial sophistication adversely affect the local macro-economy. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market. We then show that GC repurchase agreement (repo) spreads across asset classes display jumps and significant temporal variation, especially at times of predictable liquidity needs, consistent with the "safe haven" properties of Treasury securities: These jumps are driven almost entirely by the behavior of the GC repo rates of Treasury securities. Estimating the "collateral rents" earned by owners of these securities, we find such rents to be sizable for Treasury securities and nearly zero for agency and mortgage-backed securities. Finally, we link collateral values to asset prices in a simple no-arbitrage framework and show that variations in collateral values explain a significant fraction of changes in short-term yield spreads but not those of longer-term spreads. Our results point to securities' role as collateral as a promising direction of research to improve understanding of the pricing of money market securities and their spreads. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.