Knowledge that Transforms

In an asset market with explicit trading rules we characterize the trading activity of an ambiguity-averse insider who faces Knightian uncertain over other market participants’ beliefs and implements a robust trading strategy. Such insider employs a max-min choice mechanism, so that in any round of trading she selects as her market order that which maximizes her expected profits against those market beliefs which penalize her most. Her trading strategy is equivalent to that of a risk-averse insider who does not face any Knightian uncertain and possesses risk-sensitive recursive preferences. As she finds it optimal to trade more aggressively and reveal her private information at a faster pace than her risk-neutral (expected-profit maximizer) counterpart, we find that ambiguity-aversion is beneficial to the efficiency of the market.

Large, unpredictable and not fully insurable health-care costs represent a source of background risk that might deter households’ financial risk taking. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we test whether universal health insurance, like Medicare for over-65 Americans, shields against this risk promoting stockholding. We adopt a fixed-effects estimation strategy, thereby taking into account household-level heterogeneity in health status and private insurance coverage. We find that, before Medicare eligibility, households in poor health, who face a higher risk of medical expenses, are less likely to hold stocks than their healthier counterparts. Yet, this gap is mostly eliminated by Medicare. Notably, the offsetting is primarily experienced by households in poor health and without private health insurance over the observation period.

We investigate the effect of managerial ability versus luck on bank loan contracting. Borrowers showing a persistently superior managerial ability over previous years (more likely due to ability) enjoy a lower loan spread, while borrowers showing a temporary superior managerial ability (more likely due to luck) do not enjoy any spread reduction. This finding suggests that banks can discern ability from luck when pricing a loan. Firms with high-ability managers are more likely to continue their prior lower loan spread. The spread-reduction effect of managerial ability is stronger for firms with weak governance structures or poor stakeholder relationships, corroborating the notion that better managerial ability alleviates borrowers’ agency and information risks. We also find that well governed banks are better able to price governance into their borrowers’ loans, which helps explain why good governance enhances bank value.

We develop a novel framework to evaluate the quality of academic finance conferences. In particular, we analyze the publication and citation outcomes of 18,535 conference papers presented at 15 academic finance conferences between 2007 and 2012. In addition, we provide evidence of the perceived quality of these academic finance conferences by surveying a large number of participants of the 15 conferences. The use of three different quality proxies enables us to contrast levels of conference quality based on the quality of presented papers to levels of conference quality perceived by conference participants. Our results reveal two quality clusters of academic finance conferences and show that the use of the three quality dimensions, while generally robust, is associated with a number of peculiarities.

Using the full sample of U.S. banks and hand-collected data on enforcement actions over 2000–2014, we analyze the role of these interventions in promoting several aspects of accounting quality. We find that enforcement actions issued for both risk-related and accounting-related reasons lead to significant improvements in accounting quality. This improvement is consistently found for earnings smoothing, big-bath accounting, timely recognition of future loan losses, the association of loan loss provisions with future loan charge offs, loss avoidance, and cash flow predictability and earnings persistence. Most of the effects are somewhat more potent in the crisis period and survive in several sensitivity tests. Our findings highlight the imperative role of regulatory interventions in promoting bank accounting quality.

Earlier research has shown that euro-area primary public debt markets affect secondary markets. We find that more successful auctions of euro area public debt, as captured by higher bid-to-cover ratios, lead to lower secondary-market yields following the auctions. This effect is stronger when market volatility is higher. We rationalize both findings using a simple theoretical model of primary dealer behavior, in which the primary dealers receive a signal about the value of the asset auctioned.

One key risk to the banking system is how funding costs will change as monetary policy is normalized and interest rates rise after almost a decade of near-zero rates. Our contribution is to develop a model that jointly estimates banks’ balance sheets and retail interest rates to arrive at a consistent estimate of the change in bank funding costs as market rates change. Our estimates imply a 100 basis-point shock to the Federal Funds rate would increase overall deposit funding costs by about $40 billion, which is roughly equal to 25% of aggregate annual net income for commercial banks and savings institutions. We also find that deposit rate responses are largely symmetric, in contrast to some previous research showing deposit rates are less responsive to upward movements in reference rates. We introduce unique and confidential data on bank deposit betas to anchor our results.

Previous literature has shown mixed results on the role of female participation on bank boards and bank performance: some papers find that more women on boards enhance financial performance, while others find negative or no effects. Applying instrumental variables methods to data on approximately 90 U.S. bank holding companies over the 1999–2015 period, we argue that these inconclusive results are due to the fact that there is a non-linear, U-shaped relationship between gender diversity on boards and various measures of bank performance: female participation has a positive effect once a threshold level of gender diversity is achieved. Furthermore, this positive effect is only observed in better capitalized banks. Our results suggest that continuing the voluntary expansion of gender diversity on bank boards will be value-enhancing, provided that they are well capitalized.

This paper studies the effects of gender interactions on the supply of and demand for credit using data from a large Albanian lender. We document that first-time borrowers assigned to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan. The effect is larger when officers have little prior exposure to borrowers of the other gender and when they have more discretion to act on their gender beliefs, as proxied by financial market competition and branch size. We also find that first-time borrowers matched with opposite-sex officers pay higher interest rates and receive smaller and shorter-maturity loans, but do not experience higher arrears. Our results are consistent with the existence of a gender bias and learning effects that lead to the disappearance of the bias.

This paper proposes a method to compute ex-ante trading costs at the intraday level from limit order books. Using nearly 500 of the largest traded companies in the NYSE ArcaBook, we show that these costs have nontrivial intraday dynamics, are negatively related to volume and positively related to volatility. When ex-ante trading costs are incorporated into price impact specifications, the results show that this measure provides relevant information about price changes of the market at a high frequency level. Our evidence suggest that ex-ante trading costs constitute a new source of information for the study of intraday liquidity.