Knowledge that Transforms

Economic theories posit conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepre-neurial dynamism. We investigate the impact of wealth inequality on business dynamics by constructing local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents, home equity, and 1880 farmland. We then identify the effect of wealth inequality on entrepre-neurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 Homestead Act. Wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit, and the proportion of high-tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas. Wealth inequality also lowers the supply of public goods, such as education. Growth in income per capita consequently lags.

Why did banks experience massive deposit inflows during the pandemic? We discover that deposit interest rates at bank branches in counties with higher COVID-19 infection rates fell by more than rates at branches—even branches of the same bank—in counties with lower infection rates. Credit drawdowns, national policies, such as the Payment Protection Program, and a flight-to-safety do not account for these cross-branch changes in deposit rates. Evidence suggests that higher local COVID-19 infection rates are associated with households’ greater anxiety about future job and income losses, anxiety that induces households to reduce spending and increase deposits.

Banks face liquidity and capital pressures that favor selling off the loans they originate, but loan sales undermine their monitoring incentives. A bank’s loan default history is a noisy measure of its past monitoring choices, which can serve as a reputation mechanism to incentivize current monitoring. In equilibrium, higher reputation banks monitor (weakly) more intensively; if retention is credible, they generally retain less of the loans they originate. Monitoring is difficult to sustain in periods with uncommonly large spikes in loan demand (“booms”), especially for low-reputation banks, which are more likely to accommodate boom demand and forgo monitoring.

We develop a new global asset pricing model to study how illiquidity interacts with market segmentation and investability constraints in 42 markets. Noninvestable stocks that can only be held by foreign investors earn higher expected returns compared to freely investable stocks due to limited risk sharing and higher illiquidity. In addition to the world market premium, on average, developed and emerging market noninvestables earn an annual unspanned local market risk premium of 1.17% and 9.04%, and a liquidity level premium of 1.06% and 2.39%, respectively. These results obtained in a conditional setup are robust to the choice of liquidity measure.

I quantify the risk-return relationship in the foreign exchange market in the cross-section and across investment horizons by focusing on the role of multiple sources of US consumption risk. To this end, I estimate a flexible structural model of the joint dynamics of aggregate consumption, inflation, nominal interest rate, and stochastic variance with cross-equation restrictions implied by recursive preferences. I identify the following four structural shocks: inflation, short-run, long-run and variance consumption risks. To measure their relative importance, I compute marginal quantities and prices of risk (marginal Sharpe ratios) in the cross-section of currency baskets for alternative investment horizons. I find that the long-run consumption risk plays a prominent role: it carries an average quarterly Sharpe ratio of 0.28 and contributes to the spread in excess returns between baskets of high and low interest rate currencies across investment horizons from one to five quarters. The short-run consumption risk has an effect on currencies at the horizon of one quarter only, where it explains at least 40% of the corresponding spread in excess returns. The carry trade profitability disappears at horizons longer than four quarters.

We investigate the connections between bank capital regulation and the prevalence of lightly regulated nonbanks (shadow banks) in the U.S. corporate loan market. For identification, we exploit a supervisory credit register of syndicated loans, loan-time fixed effects, and shocks to capital requirements arising from surprise features of the U.S. implementation of Basel III. We find that less-capitalized banks reduce loan retention, particularly among loans with higher capital requirements and at times when capital is scarce, and nonbanks step in. This reallocation is associated with important adverse effects during the 2008 crisis: loans funded by nonbanks with fragile liabilities are less likely to be rolled over and experience greater price volatility.

We analyze the impact of monetary policy on cross-border bank flows for a large sample of countries over two decades. We find evidence in favor of a cross-border risk-taking channel, as the monetary policy stance of source countries is an important determinant of cross-border bank flows. A relatively tighter monetary policy in source countries prompts banks to reallocate their lending toward safer foreign counterparties. The cross-border reallocation of credit is more pronounced for source countries with lower-capitalized banks. Also, the reallocation is directed toward foreign borrowers in relatively safer destinations, such as advanced economies or economies with investment-grade sovereign ratings.

This paper studies how the labor market frictions of skilled workers affect corporate valuation. The analysis features immigrant workers’ mobility constraints imposed by the U.S. green card application process and exploits exogenous variations caused by imperfections in the current immigration system. The study finds that relaxing mobility constraints negatively influences firm value. This effect is stronger for firms with higher labor adjustment costs. Reductions in investments and increases in labor costs are channels through which labor mobility adversely affects firm value. The findings suggest that monopoly rent over skilled workers is an important economic determinant of corporate valuation.

Using U.S. equity mutual fund data, we show that portfolio pumping—an illegal trading activity that artificially inflates year- and quarter-end portfolio returns—is more pronounced among single-managed funds compared with team-managed ones. The return inflation by team-managed funds is 45% lower than by single-managed funds at year-ends. Also, portfolio pumping decreases as team size increases. These results are driven by peer effects among teams and, sometimes, amplified by less convex flow-performance relation in team-managed funds. Our findings are robust to differences in fund governance, manager career concerns, local networks, fund family policies, and changes in the SEC’s enforcement policies.

Do social networks help firms recruit talented managers? In our setting, firms are randomly connected to prospective young managers through former employees. Under a discrete choice model, we find networks increase the likelihood firms hire high-ability managers, while having no effect on the hiring rate of low-ability managers. Effects are greatest for nonlocal firms, strong ties, and peers living in the same neighborhood. Survey evidence suggests social networks promote recruitment by providing information about firm fundamentals to potential applicants. Our results help rationalize why the majority of managers hold prior connections to the firm.