[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.]

This article tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish between new and old information about firms. I define the staleness of a news story as its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. I find that firms' stock returns respond less to stale news. Even so, a firm's return on the day of stale news negatively predicts its return in the following week. Individual investors trade more aggressively on news when news is stale. The subsequent return reversal is significantly larger in stocks with above-average individual investor trading activity. These results are consistent with the idea that individual investors overreact to stale information, leading to temporary movements in firms' stock prices. 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.

[This article tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish between new and old information about firms. I define the staleness of a news story as its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. I find that firms' stock returns respond less to stale news. Even so, a firm's return on the day of stale news negatively predicts its return in the following week. Individual investors trade more aggressively on news when news is stale. The subsequent return reversal is significantly larger in stocks with above-average individual investor trading activity. These results are consistent with the idea that individual investors overreact to stale information, leading to temporary movements in firms' stock prices.]

[The massive losses that banks incurred with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market have raised concerns about their ability to continue lending to corporations. We investigate these concerns. We find that firms paid higher loan spreads during the subprime crisis. Importantly, the increase in loan spreads was higher for firms that borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses. These results hold after we control for firm-, bank-, and loan-specific factors, and account for endogeneity of bank losses. These findings, together with our evidence that borrowers took out smaller loans during the crisis when they borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses, lend support to the concerns about bank lending following their subprime losses.]

[We quantify the effect of recourse on default and find that recourse affects default by lowering the borrower's sensitivity to negative equity. At the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans, borrowers are 30% more likely to default in non-recourse states. Furthermore, for homes appraised at $500,000 to $750,000, borrowers are twice as likely to default in non-recourse states. We also find that defaults are more likely to occur through a lender-friendly procedure, such as a deed in lieu, in states that allow deficiency judgments. We find no evidence that mortgage interest rates are lower in recourse states.]

[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.]

[This article presents a study of how stock price efficiency and return distributions are affected by short-sale constraints. The study is based on a global dataset, from 2005 to 2008, that includes more than 12,600 stocks from 26 countries. We present two main findings. First, lending supply has a significant impact on efficiency. Stocks with higher short-sale constraints, measured as low lending supply, have lower price efficiency. Second, relaxing short-sales constraints is not associated with an increase in either price instability or the occurrence of extreme negative returns.]

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.

The massive losses that banks incurred with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market have raised concerns about their ability to continue lending to corporations. We investigate these concerns. We find that firms paid higher loan spreads during the subprime crisis. Importantly, the increase in loan spreads was higher for firms that borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses. These results hold after we control for firm-, bank-, and loan-specific factors, and account for endogeneity of bank losses. These findings, together with our evidence that borrowers took out smaller loans during the crisis when they borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses, lend support to the concerns about bank lending following their subprime losses. 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 quantify the effect of recourse on default and find that recourse affects default by lowering the borrower's sensitivity to negative equity. At the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans, borrowers are 30% more likely to default in non-recourse states. Furthermore, for homes appraised at $500,000 to $750,000, borrowers are twice as likely to default in non-recourse states. We also find that defaults are more likely to occur through a lender-friendly procedure, such as a deed in lieu, in states that allow deficiency judgments. We find no evidence that mortgage interest rates are lower in recourse states.