Knowledge that Transforms

We characterize the relationship between the rent-to-price ratio, expected returns, and expected rent growth in a dynamic housing valuation model, where the middle-aged-to-young (MY) ratio determines the slowly evolving mean of the rent-to-price ratio. The link between demographic trends and the housing market dynamics is established by analyzing how individuals’ housing demand varies across age cohorts using household-level survey data. Empirical results show that deviations of the rent-to-price ratio from its slowly evolving mean, which is determined by the MY ratio, exhibit pronounced predictive power for returns but weak predictive power for rent growth. Further analysis reveals heterogeneous evidence across sample cities.

An initial public offering (IPO) can have diverse impacts on incumbent firms. We identify a valuation channel using a pairwise measure of technological proximity between the new entrant and incumbent firms. By analyzing the patent data of firms listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Board, we find a significant increase in the valuation of the incumbent firm when its patent portfolio exhibits a higher degree of similarity to the IPO firm. This positive spillover effect differs from other well-documented peer effects of IPO shocks, suggesting a novel mechanism that operates through technological linkages, particularly among technology-intensive firms.

With the recent evolution of the cryptocurrency market, financial misconduct has become a major concern. Using on-chain data from the 500 most traded NFT (non-fungible token) collections, this study investigates wash trading in NFT markets. We first detect suspicious wash trades that form closed loops and then validate the prices of these trades using Benford’s Law. Excluding token-incentivized wash trades, we propose a conceptual model and argue that collusion between wash traders and insiders is the primary motivation of wash trading. Empirical analysis reveals that insiders tend to sell during or shortly after wash trading. This manipulation creates a pump-and-dump effect, causing losses for buyers during the pump phase. Our research reveals the underlying mechanisms of such misconduct and highlights the need for regulation in the cryptocurrency market.

Stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy are often viewed as adding deadweight costs and leading to inefficient liquidation. However, ex ante, they also increase firms' borrowing capacity and reduce financial constraints. This study investigates shareholders' overall attitudes toward enhanced creditor rights in bankruptcy by examining the impact of the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws across U.S. states on the cost of equity capital. We find that the strengthening of creditor rights leads to a significant reduction in the cost of equity capital, with the effect being more pronounced among financially constrained firms and firms with more growth opportunities and volatile cash flows. The reduction is stronger among firms that are more likely to utilize securitized debt. Overall, our results suggest that enhanced creditor rights in bankruptcy improve shareholder value through increased borrowing capacity.

A barrage of regulatory requirements has been issued to increase the impartiality of sell-side analysts’ research reports and create a wall between equity research and investment banking departments. Yet studies suggest a persistent organizational culture within the profession that encourages optimistically biased research reports for current and potential investment banking clients. To examine potential solutions to this issue, we focus on sell-side analysts’ target price optimism and find that analysts at brokerages with higher female representation issue significantly less optimistic target prices, especially when they face incentives to inflate forecasts due to their brokerage’s affiliation to the firm being analyzed. To identify the mechanism behind this result, we explore analysts’ optimism bias in situations when mergers between banks change gender composition in a way that is exogenous to the analysts, as well as when analysts voluntarily switch between brokerages with different gender compositions. The results of these analyses, along with a lag and forward test of the relation between the female proportion of analysts and optimism bias, indicate that gender composition plays a significant role in shaping brokerage culture. We rule out that results are driven by the gender of the individual analyst and confirm our results’ robustness to various specifications. Our findings suggest the potential for gender composition of the workforce to aid self-regulation in the financial industry.

This study examines the long-term effects of the 1990s Japanese bank bailouts on borrower firms’ financing policies. Using a two-way fixed effects model on data from Japanese banks and listed companies, I find that these interventions significantly influenced firms’ financial strategies. Firms associated with banks that received bailouts exhibited persistent increases in their long-term debt-to-asset ratios and decreases in their cash-to-asset ratios. The effects diverged between zombie and non-zombie firms: while non-zombie firms exhibited minimal capital structure changes, zombie firms demonstrated pronounced increases in long-term debt ratios, decreases in cash ratios and retained earnings, and were more likely to maintain relationships with their main banks. These findings suggest that bank bailouts can influence capital allocation patterns, potentially favoring less efficient zombie firms, with implications for economic efficiency and financial stability.

Do employees trust founders more than professional managers? We explore this question with employee actions that are indicative of their distrust in management. We document significant differences in unionization efforts, labor strikes, and unfair labor practice (ULP) complaints between founder-managed firms and professionally managed firms. We posit that these differences stem from the predictability of corporate culture in founder firms and the alignment of interests between founders and employees. Although we employ various methods to establish causation, drawing definitive conclusions regarding employee trust in management is challenging due to the vastly different characteristics of founder-led firms compared to professionally managed firms.

This paper examines the effects on social welfare of changes in coverage levels within deposit insurance schemes. It utilizes a solid theoretical framework and takes advantage of a quasi-natural experiment and bank-level data to measure the impact of an increase in Colombia’s deposit insurance coverage level. For the case studied, the benefits outweigh the costs, resulting in a positive net impact on welfare. However, some banks concentrate most of the gains. The size of a bank, its probability of default, and the change in the percentage of insured deposits that occurred due to the increase in the coverage level are critical. Two extensions of the main model are also analyzed. The first allows banks to be bailed out because of “too-big-to-fail” considerations, and the second incorporates banks’ reaction to the increase in the coverage level. The benefits of increasing the coverage level remain positive in both cases but are lower than using the main model.

This study investigates the performance of trend factors across different markets around the world and demonstrates that the trend factors perform well across most of developed markets and many emerging markets, outperforming the market portfolio, short-term reversal, momentum, and long-term reversal. We further examine how cultural and legal differences influence the performance of the trend factor trading strategy and find it is more profitable in countries where the individualism is higher and securities laws are better enforced. Finally, the global trend factor aggregating individual market trend factors performs well and explains various global portfolios’ returns. The findings suggest that the trend factors present a challenge to traditional risk-based asset pricing theories, and trend factor trading strategies may deserve more attention in international portfolio management.

This study investigates the potential impact of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic on cognitive biases in capital markets, focusing on individual mutual fund investors’ trading behavior in the post-SARS era. Using a proprietary data set obtained from a large Chinese mutual fund family comprising comprehensive trading information, this research finds that individuals in areas experiencing severe SARS cases exhibit a stronger disposition effect after the end of the epidemic. It further indicates that unsophisticated investors are more vulnerable to the disposition effect and this mood regulation–induced behavior is irrational and related to behavioral biases, ultimately worsening investors’ circumstances. These results hold across a wide range of robustness checks.