Knowledge that Transforms

We develop a model in which overconfident investors overestimate their own signal quality but are skeptical of others’ Investors who are initially uninformed believe that early-informed investors have learned little, leading the former investors to provide excess liquidity, which, in turn, causes underreaction and short-run momentum. Skeptical investors can also react to stale information, causing momentum, followed by reversals. Hence, skepticism generates both momentum and reversals; the latter are amplified if investors overassess their own signal precision. We explain how long-run reversals can disappear while shorter-term momentum prevails, provide empirical implications, and link momentum to liquidity and price efficiency.

We show that housing markets provide information about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. Real estate is exposed to both consumption and climate risk and its term structure of discount rates is downward sloping, reaching 2.6% for payoffs beyond 100 years. We use a tractable asset pricing model that incorporates features of climate change to show that the term structure of discount rates for climate-hedging investments is thus upward sloping but bounded above by the risk-free rate. At horizons at which risk-free rates are unavailable, the estimated housing discount rates provide an upper bound.

We find that capital flows to hedge funds in different countries are influenced by the strength and the enforcement of investor protection laws. Hedge funds located in weak investor protection countries exhibit greater sensitivity of investor outflow to poor performance, relative to funds in countries with strong protection. Furthermore, weak investor protection is associated with fund managers engaging in greater returns management. Our findings suggest that in countries with weaker investor protection, poor fund performance exposes investors to a greater risk of fraud and legal jeopardy, thus triggering a larger outflow of capital.

Shareholder perks are in-kind gifts or purchase discounts that disproportionately reward small shareholders. Data from Japanese firms indicate that firms initiating perk programs attract individual retail shareholders and experience increases in share values. We find support for three channels by which perks increase firm value: an increase in share liquidity, a decrease in the equity cost of capital, and signaling to investors. A fourth channel, by which perks help to market the firm’s products to consumers, receives mixed support. We do not find evidence that perk programs work to entrench managers.

We document extreme disruption in debt markets during the COVID-19 crisis: a severe price crash accompanied by significant dislocations at the safer end of the credit spectrum. Investment-grade corporate bonds traded at a discount to credit default swaps; exchange-traded funds traded at a discount to net asset value, more so for safer bonds. The Federal Reserve’s announcement of corporate bond purchases caused these dislocations to disappear and prices to recover. These facts inform potential theories of the disruption. The best explanation is an acute liquidity need for specific bond investors, such as mutual funds, leading them to liquidate large positions.

Liquidity restrictions on investors, like the redemption gates and liquidity fees introduced in the 2016 money market fund (MMF) reform, are meant to improve financial stability. However, we find evidence that such liquidity restrictions exacerbated the run on prime MMFs during the COVID-19 crisis. Our results indicate that gates and fees could generate strategic complementarities among investors in crisis times. Severe outflows from prime MMFs led the Federal Reserve to intervene with the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF). Using MMLF microdata, we show how the provision of “liquidity of last resort” stabilized prime funds.

Institutional investors expect infrastructure to deliver long-term stable returns but gain exposure to infrastructure predominantly through finite-horizon closed private funds. The cash flows delivered by infrastructure funds display similar volatility and cyclicality as other private equity investments, and their performance similarly depends on quick deal exits. Despite weak risk-adjusted performance and failure to match the supposed characteristics of infrastructure assets, closed funds have received more commitments over time, particularly from public investors. Public institutional investors perform worse than private institutional investors. ESG preferences and regulations explain 25%–40% of their increased allocation to infrastructure and 30% of their underperformance.

In stark contrast with liquid asset returns, commercial real estate idiosyncratic return means and variances do not scale with the holding period, even after accounting for all cash flow-relevant events. This puzzling phenomenon survives controlling for vintage effects, systematic risk heterogeneity, and a host of other explanations. To explain the findings, I derive an equilibrium search-based asset-pricing model that, when calibrated, provides an excellent fit to transactions data. A structural model of transaction risk seems crucial to understanding real estate price dynamics. These insights extend to other highly illiquid asset classes, such as private equity and residential real estate.

We show that a new measure of buy-side competition explains momentum profits. The momentum quintile spread is 1.11% when competition is low and negligible when competition is high. Better alphas are attained with superior Sharpe and Sortino ratios, with no negative skewness, and in more investible strategies featuring value-weighted portfolios and large capitalization stocks. Stock characteristics traditionally related to momentum do not explain our results. Tests based on long-term reversals, the trading patterns of funds, their style peers, distant funds, and retail investors suggest that slow information diffusion explains the large momentum spreads and momentum reversals in low competition markets.

Lou and Shu decompose Amihud’s illiquidity measure (ILLIQ) proposing that its component, the average of inverse dollar trading volume (IDVOL), is sufficient to explain the pricing of illiquidity. Their decomposition misses a component of ILLIQ that is related to illiquidity. We find that this component affects stock returns significantly, both in the cross-section and in time-series. We show that the ILLIQ premium is significantly positive after controlling for mispricing, sentiment, and seasonality. In addition, the aggregate market ILLIQ outperforms market IDVOL in estimating the effect of market illiquidity shocks on realized stock returns.