Can leaders’ names have an impact on their compensation and firm performance? We reason about how and why certain leaders’ names are related to higher financial compensation, yet unrelated to their ability to lead a company and thus firm performance. Based on a sample of 6132 CEOs working at large, publicly traded (S&P 1500) firms, we find that CEOs who have more “fluent” names—or names associated with feelings of cognitive ease (e.g., shorter length, more common)—obtain greater financial as well as non-financial perks, even though they are no more competent. Therefore, the study looks beyond the influence of sex- and race-typed names to help explain the observed mismatch between top management compensation and firm performance. We discuss the theoretical implication of this study for the cognitive bias and discrimination literature, and managerial implications for strategic human resource management.

We explore interconnectedness in the interbank overnight lending market and propose the liquidity network and the urgent borrower network which capture the urgency to trade. The liquidity network connects the initiating party in a trade to the passive party, while the urgent borrower network connects passive sellers (lenders) to urgent buyers (borrowers). Along with the buyer/seller trading network, we show these networks complement each other, revealing valuable information that improves short-term forecasts of soft and hard information and country-specific yield spreads. Connectivity increases in these networks during raises volatility and boosts volume, revealing the dual nature of interconnectedness—too much interconnectedness may increase systemic risk, but too little may impede market functioning.

This paper studies the link between banks’ geographic specialization and the growth in their mortgage lending. Specialized banks increase their lending relatively less during the boom (2004 - 2006) and they experience a lower reduction in their loans through the following bust (2007 - 2009). In the aggregate, bank specialization has an impact on the overall credit rather than a mere reallocation of lending: MSAs with a higher exposure to specialized banks experience less expansion and contraction in mortgages. As a result, higher bank specialization is associated with a less severe boom and bust cycle in house prices.

Can fintech close the gender gap in access to financial services? Using novel survey data for 28 countries, this paper finds a large and ubiquitous ‘fintech gender gap’: while 29% of men use fintech products, only 21% of women do. This difference exceeds the gender gap in bank account ownership at traditional financial institutions. While country characteristics and individual-level controls explain about a third of the fintech gender gap, the residual gap declines by 60% when accounting for gender differences in the willingness to use new financial technology, the suitability of fintech products, and the willingness to use fintech entrants if they offer cheaper products. The paper concludes by discussing drivers of differences in attitudes and implications for policy to foster financial inclusion with new technology.

This article investigates spillovers from foreign economies to the U.S. through changes in long-term Treasury yields. We document a decline in the contribution of U.S. domestic news to the variance of long-term Treasury yields and an increased importance of overnight yield changes, a proxy for foreign shocks’ contribution to U.S. yields. A model that identifies U.S., Euro area, and U.K. shocks that move global yields suggests that foreign shocks account for at least 20% of the daily variation in long-term U.S. yields in recent years. We also document the predictability of long-term U.S. yields by the U.S.–foreign yield spread.

This paper assesses when the validity of difference‐in‐differences depends on functional form. We provide a novel characterization: the parallel trends assumption holds under all strictly monotonic transformations of the outcome if and only if a stronger “parallel trends”‐type condition holds for the cumulative distribution function of untreated potential outcomes. This condition for parallel trends to be insensitive to functional form is satisfied if and essentially only if the population can be partitioned into a subgroup for which treatment is effectively randomly assigned and a remaining subgroup for which the distribution of untreated potential outcomes is stable over time. These conditions have testable implications, and we introduce falsification tests for the null that parallel trends is insensitive to functional form.

A common approach to estimation of dynamic economic models is to calibrate a subset of model parameters and keep them fixed when estimating the remaining parameters. Calibrated parameters likely affect conclusions based on the model, but estimation time often makes a systematic investigation of the sensitivity to calibrated parameters infeasible. I propose a simple and computationally low-cost measure of the sensitivity of parameters and other objects of interest to the calibrated parameters. In the main empirical application, I revisit the analysis of life-cycle savings motives in Gourinchas and Parker (2002) and show that some estimates are sensitive to calibrations.

Economically insignificant tick sizes encourage undercutting behavior, thus harming market quality. Theoretical work shows that increasing tick sizes in unconstrained markets reduces undercutting and improves market quality. Equity market pricing grids are generally too coarse to test this prediction. We examine a cryptocurrency market with infinitesimal tick sizes where undercutting limit orders acquire price priority without meaningful economic cost. We show that increasing tick sizes reduces undercutting behavior, increases liquidity provision and quoted depth, and reduces transaction costs for institutional and retail-sized trades while decreasing short-term volatility. Tiny tick sizes are suboptimal, supporting increased minimum trading increments in tick-unconstrained markets.

While corporate social responsibility by firms aims at improving welfare for different social groups, whether it achieves this is often difficult to measure. After Apr. 2018 protests, Starbucks enacted policies that anybody could sit in their stores and use the bathroom without making a purchase. Using anonymized cellphone location data, we estimate this led to a 7.0% decline in attendance relative to other nearby coffee shops. The effect is 84% larger near homeless shelters and larger for Starbucks’ wealthier customers. The average time spent per visit declined by 4.1%. Public urination citations decreased near Starbucks locations, but other minor crimes were unchanged.