Knowledge that Transforms

This paper documents and analyzes the gender gap in the online credit market. Using data from Renrendai, a leading peer-to-peer lending platform in China, we show that lending to female borrowers is associated with better loan performance, including a lower probability of default, a higher expected profit, and a lower expected loss than for their male peers. However, despite the higher creditworthiness, we don't find any measurable gender impact on funding success rate, meaning that female borrowers have to compensate lenders by providing higher profitability to achieve a similar funding probability. These evidences indicate the existence of a gender gap that discriminate against female borrowers. Further analysis implies that this gender gap is independent of the amount of information disclosed by borrowers.

We examine foreign lenders’ use of performance pricing provisions (PPPs) in syndicated loan contracts. First, we find that foreign lenders, as a result of both higher information asymmetry and greater renegotiation costs than their domestic counterparts, adopt PPPs instead of tight covenants in their contracts. Second, foreign lenders have a greater preference for PPPs based on credit ratings as opposed to those based on accounting ratios than their domestic counterparts. This is consistent with informationally disadvantaged foreign lenders valuing rating-based PPPs’ signaling role, with the role of accounting-based PPPs addressing the hold-up problem being less relevant to them. In addition, the above effects mainly exist when foreign lenders serve as participants rather than lead arrangers in the syndicate. Overall, our findings establish the important role played by rating-based PPPs in addressing foreign participant lenders’ information asymmetry and thereby promoting cross-border lending.

Directors who hold concurrent directorships within a single industry may have an information advantage or face conflicts of interest. This practice is permitted in the Australian pension fund industry, even between competing funds. Results show that funds with directors who hold competing board seats are associated with poor fund performance. Non-competing seats are associated with better fund performance in complex funds. Directors favor positions which align with personal and reputational incentives. Overall, the opposing arguments regarding the effect of multiple directorships are not mutually exclusive but dependent on cross-sectional variation in fund characteristics and the types of directorships held.

We examine whether labor market frictions affect firms’ tax aggressiveness. Exploiting the adoption of U.S. state-level Wrongful Discharge Laws as a quasi-exogenous shock to a firm's firing costs, we document a decline in tax aggressiveness for firms located in states that increase employment protection. We further show that greater employment protection increases distress risk. The decline in tax aggressiveness is more pronounced for firms that are more vulnerable to financial distress and constrained from external financial markets. Our results imply that firms avoid risky tax positions in order to mitigate increased distress risk due to more rigid labor costs.

We apply a structural topic model (STM) to analyze European Central Bank (ECB) communication regarding the monetary pillar of its monetary policy strategy. We do so by quantifying the transcripts of the ECB President’s introductory statements at the press conferences that accompany the regular meetings of the ECB Governing Council. Our evidence shows that, within its monetary pillar, the ECB has gradually shifted its focus away from a genuine monetary analysis towards monitoring the stability of the European financial system. We go on to augment a standard Taylor rule by quantitative indicators obtained from the STM to assess whether the monetary pillar in general, and the shift in focus in particular, has had a measurable impact on the ECB’s monetary policy stance. We find that the monetary analysis has had a bearing on the interest rate setting in the early years of the ECB’s existence, but this influence completely disappears in the latter years of the sample. Furthermore, we find no evidence that financial stability considerations in the ECB communication have influenced interest rate decisions either before or after the financial crisis.

We extend the framework of Aikman et al. (2017) that maps vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system to a broader set of financial vulnerabilities in 27 advanced and emerging economies. We capture a holistic view of the evolution of financial vulnerabilities before and after a banking crisis. We find that, before a banking crisis, pressures in asset valuations materialize first and then a build-up of imbalances in the external, financial, and nonfinancial sectors occurs. After a crisis, these vulnerabilities subside, but sovereign debt imbalances rise as governments try to mitigate the consequences of the crisis. Our main indexes, which aggregate these vulnerabilities, predicts banking crises better than the credit-to-GDP gap (CGG) or sector-specific vulnerability indexes, especially at long horizons. Our aggregate indexes also explain the variation in the severity of banking crises and the duration of recessions relatively well, as it incorporates possible spillover and amplification channels of financial vulnerabilities from one sector to another. Therefore, our framework is useful for macroprudential policy making and crisis management.

We study the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on shareholder value. We argue that long-term investors can ensure that managers choose the amount of CSR that maximizes shareholder value. We find that long-term investors do increase the value to shareholders of CSR activities, not through higher cash flow but rather through lower cash flow risk. Following prior work, we use indexing by investors and state laws on stakeholder orientation for identification. Our findings suggest that CSR activities can create shareholder value as long as managers are properly monitored by long-term investors.

In the 1990s it was widely agreed that neither Europe nor the United States satisfied the conditions for constituting an optimum currency area, although the U.S. came closer (Bayoumi and Eichengreen 1993). Moderating this concern about Europe was the fact that it was possible to distinguish a regional core and periphery. Using updated data, we confirm that the United States remains closer to an optimum currency area. More intriguingly, the Euro Area shows striking changes in correlations and responses. We interpret these as reflecting hysteresis with a financial twist, in which the financial system causes aggregate supply and demand shocks to reinforce each other. An implication is that the Euro Area needs vigorous, coordinated regulation of its banking and financial systems by a single supervisor—that monetary union without banking union will not work.

Family involvement as chair of the board combines the reputation of the controlling family and the firm. Thus, the family's incentive to prevent reputation loss acts as a corporate governance mechanism in mitigating self-serving and bad news hoarding behavior of family firms. We find a lower future stock price crash risk in family firms with family related chairman, compared with family firms with non-family related chairman. The impact of family related chairman is more pronounced in firms with weaker external monitoring and more severe financial distress, and when families have greater reputation concern. Additionally, we find family-chair firms conduct more bad news forecasting, less tunneling behavior, higher earnings quality, as well as have lower costs of equity and overall better performance in the future. The family CEO has little impact on future stock price crash risk.

This paper introduces a class of Affine multivariate GARCH models. Our setting offers flexibility to accommodate stylized facts of asset returns like dynamic conditional correlation and a covariance dependent pricing kernel. The model admits a closed-form recursive representation for the moment generating function under both historical and risk-neutral measures, permitting efficient multi-asset option pricing and risk management calculations. We illustrate the applicability and impact of our framework on the five assets for which volatility indices are made publicly available, together with the S&P 500 Index. We demonstrate that our methodology is remarkably faster than Monte Carlo simulation when pricing two-assets options. We confirm the importance of incorporating a covariance-dependent pricing kernel compared to a linear pricing kernel by reporting large and economically significant changes in the price of two-asset options. Similarly, our single-factor Index model structure for the marginal can lead to differences of up to 70% in the price of single-asset options and empirical option pricing errors that are up to 41% smaller than what is obtained with a univariate model with a linear pricing kernel.