Knowledge that Transforms

We explore information spillovers and cross-monitoring between the stock and loan markets, focusing on the roles of short sellers and banks. Using Regulation SHO that directly affects short-selling constraints in the stock market but is exogenous to the loan market, we find that only those firms without bank monitors exhibit significant stock price declines upon the announcement of SHO. We also document that while short interest increases following SHO, it increases far less for firms with bank monitors. Using bank and lending relationship characteristics, we find SHO returns increase in the bank's ability and incentive to monitor. Our exploration of equity ownership structure reveals that the presence of block holders and dedicated owners has little to no effect on our results, suggesting that bank monitors complement shareholder monitoring efforts.

This paper examines the drivers of housing market volatility through dynamic search-and-matching models that incorporate auctions. Two versions of the model are developed: one in which buyers visit homes randomly and another where search is directed by seller reserve prices. The analysis demonstrates that granular shocks and microstructure frictions—arising from the interaction of idiosyncratic and infrequent transactions, search frictions, and auctions-based pricing—generate persistent volatility, even in large markets such as Los Angeles. The paper also identifies systematic weekly patterns in housing activity, which account for up to 60% of monthly variation in sales and listings due to calendar composition. Recognizing and filtering out these predictable fluctuations ensures that the model targets economically meaningful sources of volatility. Together, granular shocks, microstructure frictions, and weekly patterns explain 70%–80% of sales and listings volatility, with the remainder driven by exogenous shocks. These findings underscore the importance of auctions, granular shocks, microstructure frictions, and weekly patterns in understanding housing market dynamics.

Beggar-thy-neighbour in macroprudential policy? This paper studies the impact of macroprudential policies – specifically OSII buffers – on banking groups and their cross-border operations. Using granular data from three confidential databases, we present the first evidence on how banking groups respond to changes in capital requirements. Our findings reveal that: (i) consolidated parent banks constrained by OSII buffers cut back on debt and equity holdings in their foreign subsidiaries, altering global financial structures; (ii) subsidiaries with reduced funding and equity from their parent show a notable decline in lending to non-financial corporations; and (iii) overall, cross-border subsidiaries of OSII-constrained banks exhibit reduced lending and risk-taking towards non-financial corporations, hinting at a role of these subsidiaries in propping up the group’s consolidated capital buffers. While higher capital buffers enhance financial stability by curbing excessive risk-taking, they also constrain the funding and lending capacities of foreign subsidiaries, disrupting local credit markets and creating a “beggar-thy-neighbour” problem. Policymakers need to balance these impacts with the benefits of financial integration.

This study investigates the relationships between currency portfolios and market conditions. We incorporate information on cross-sectional foreign exchange (FX) volatility and ambiguity to determine FX market regimes. Unlike previous studies, we find that high FX volatility leads to higher currency carry returns only when FX ambiguity is high, suggesting that investors avoid making trading decisions during these periods. As a result, the unwinding of currency carry trades, which is usually associated with high FX volatility and declining in carry trade returns, does not occur. We also observe that this pattern does not emerge in other currency portfolios.

The market for passive ETFs and passive ETF benchmarks has exploded. Passive ETF sponsors get index benchmarks mainly from brand name index providers such as S&P and Russell. We show how benchmark and index provider characteristics are relevant for sponsors and different investor types. ETF benchmarks from large index providers attract more capital. Institutional flows exhibit a strong preference for brand name benchmarks, but do-it-yourself retail investor flows do not. ETFs that change benchmarks reduce their tracking error and have 7% higher flows in the subsequent three months, again driven by institutional flows.

This study examines the role of non-severe depression as a psychological anchor against overoptimism. Using earnings forecasts from Estimize, we find that an increase in the proportion of the U.S. population with depression is associated with improved forecast accuracy among users. This effect is concentrated among forecasts that are optimistic and analysts who take longer time to issue forecasts, highlighting reduced optimism and slow information processing as economic mechanisms that explain our results. We also show that this effect is distinct from the influence of temporary seasonal depression or other sentiment measures on decision-making. Overall, our research establishes a link between depression and crowdsourced financial evaluations

Life insurers sell savings contracts with surrender options, which allow policyholders to prematurely receive guaranteed surrender values. These surrender options move toward the money when interest rates rise. Hence, higher interest rates raise surrender rates, as we document empirically by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in monetary policy. Using a calibrated model, we examine the impact of surrender options on insurers’ liquidity and portfolio rebalancing during an interest rate rise. We show how asset sales result from insurer balance sheet dynamics and explore their interaction with investment strategies and surrender value guarantees.

Consider a defaultable bond traded in a financial market that is subject to shocks and regime shifts. Its recovery payment has a hybrid structure, comprising two components: one contingent on historical information up to the time of default, and the other an independent variable indexed by the regime at the time of default. The default intensity, interest rate, and reference rate are assumed to be general deterministic functions of certain state variables, while these state variables jointly follow a jump-diffusion process, with drift and volatility coefficients governed by the regime and with jumps induced by shocks. We construct a risk-neutral pricing measure that prices all risk sources in an integrated manner. A rigorous verification of this pricing measure reveals the corresponding time-dependent market prices of these risk sources. The resulting pricing framework is applicable to most defaultable bonds and credit derivatives.

We provide compelling evidence of the association between credit standards at loan origination in the corporate sector and default risk. While this relationship has been extensively studied in the mortgage market, it remains underexplored in corporate lending. Using a comprehensive dataset from the Spanish credit register merged with firm-level balance sheet information over a full financial cycle, we show that debt-to-assets and interest coverage ratios at loan origination are significant predictors of future corporate loan defaults. The strength of this association varies across the financial cycle, sectors, firm size and age, and prior banking relationships. Real estate firms and small and medium-sized enterprises exhibit the strongest link between initial credit conditions and future default outcomes. Our findings suggest that limits in corporate credit standards, similar to those widely used in mortgage markets, could enhance firms’ resilience to adverse shocks and complement capital-based instruments within the macroprudential toolkit. However, the effectiveness and potential side effects of such measures depend critically on firm-specific characteristics and sectoral heterogeneity, underscoring the need for a targeted and flexible policy design.

We examine the causal effect of tariff uncertainty on firms’ cost of debt. Our tests exploit a unique trade policy that reduces tariff uncertainty on Chinese imports without affecting the actual tariff rate, United States (U.S.)–China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR). We reveal a significant drop in the loan spreads for firms affected by PNTR relative to other firms. We further demonstrate that such effects occur through the channel of increasing firms’ performance predictability. Overall, by examining a clean measure of uncertainty from the tariff source, we provide evidence that reducing uncertainty has a causal effect on reducing the cost of debt.