Knowledge that Transforms

Empirical evidence suggests that investor protection significantly affects ownership concentration and asset prices. We develop a dynamic asset pricing model to address the empirical regularities and uncover some of the underlying mechanisms at play. Our model features a controlling shareholder that endogenously accumulates control over a firm, and diverts a fraction of its output. Better investor protection decreases stock holdings of controlling shareholders, increases stock mean returns, and increases stock return volatilities when ownership concentration is sufficiently high, consistent with the related empirical evidence. The model also predicts that better protection increases interest rates and decreases the controlling shareholder’s leverage. Received August 14, 2017; editorial decision January 15, 2019 by Editor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

Because most mortgages in the United States are securitized in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), yield spreads on MBS are a key determinant of homeowners’ funding costs. We study variation in MBS spreads in the time series and across securities and document that MBS spreads show a pronounced cross-sectional smile with respect to the securities’ coupon rates. We present a new pricing model that uses “stripped” MBS prices to identify the contribution of non-interest-rate prepayment risk to spreads and find that this risk explains the smile, whereas the time-series spread variation is mostly accounted for by nonprepayment risk factors. Received March 30, 2015; editorial decision November 21, 2018 by Editor Leonid Kogan.

We exploit one of the largest data leaks, to date, to study whether and how firms use secret offshore vehicles. From the leaked data, we identify 338 listed firms as users of secret offshore vehicles and document that these vehicles are used to finance corruption, avoid taxes, and expropriate shareholders. Overall, the leak erased $$$174 billion in market capitalization among implicated firms. Following the increased transparency brought about by the leak, implicated firms experience lower sales from perceptively corrupt countries and avoid less tax. We conservatively estimate that 1 in 7 firms have offshore secrets. Received May 29, 2017; editorial decision December 2, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Most firms face some form of competition in product markets. The degree of competition a firm faces feeds back into its cash flows and affects the values of the securities it issues. Through its effects on stock prices, product market competition affects the prices of options on equity and leads to an inverse relationship between equity returns and volatility, generating a negative volatility skew in option prices. Using a large sample of U.S. equity options, we provide empirical support for this finding and demonstrate the importance of accounting for product market competition when explaining the cross-sectional variation in option skew. Received June 28, 2017; editorial decision October 23, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished supplementary Internet Appendices, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Portfolio diversification of firms’ controlling owners influences their firms’ capital investment. Empirically, the effect of owners’ portfolio diversification on their firms’ investment levels is positive for publicly traded firms and tends to be negative for privately held ones. These findings are consistent with predictions of a model in which a risk-averse investor simultaneously chooses her portfolio structure, and both the level and riskiness of capital investment of the firm she controls, and in which the firm can be potentially constrained in its capital investment choices. Overall, our results indicate that owners’ portfolio underdiversification and firms’ financial constraints can affect firms’ resource allocation. Received May 3, 2017; editorial decision March 8, 2019 by Editor Francesca Cornelli.

In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using approximately 500 articles of association from before 1900, we code the protections offered to shareholders in these private contracts. We find that firms voluntarily offered shareholders many of the protections that were subsequently included in statutory corporate law. We also find that companies offering better protection to shareholders had less concentrated ownership. Received August 19, 2016; editorial decision October 24, 2018 by Editor David Denis.

Firms that buy assets in fire sales earn excess returns that are 2 percentage points higher than in regular acquisitions. The mechanism behind this result is the sellers’ reduced bargaining power. We find no difference in real effects or in the combined returns for buyers and sellers between fire sales and regular acquisitions, suggesting that the quality of the match is similar in both types of transactions. The externalities of fire sales for other stakeholders are limited. These results indicate that the welfare losses associated with fire sales are smaller than previously thought. Received December 17, 2015; editorial decision November 20, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Using proprietary panel data, we show that many U.S. consumers experience financial distress (35% when distress is defined by having debt in severe delinquency, e.g.) at some point in their lives. However, most distress events are concentrated on a much smaller proportion of consumers in persistent trouble: fewer than 10% of borrowers account for half of all distress events. These facts can be largely accounted for in a straightforward extension of a workhorse model of unsecured debt with informal default that accommodates a simple form of heterogeneity in time preference. Received November 10, 2017; editorial decision November 12, 2018 by Editor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

We study the impact of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) guarantees on the market for retail deposits. Exploiting information about all personal deposit accounts in Denmark and salient changes to the deposit insurance limit, we provide evidence that systemically important banks successfully retain and attract uninsured deposits in a crisis at the expense of other banks even as they differentially lower their interest rates. The funding shock suffered by nonsystemic banks causes a decrease in their lending. The results point to the distortive effects of TBTF guarantees in the market for retail deposits. Received March 15, 2018; editorial decision January 15, 2019 by Philip Strahan.

We examine how bank capital and borrower bargaining power affect loan spreads. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, but borrower cash flow has a significant effect on this impact: compared with high-capital banks, low-capital banks charge more for borrowers with low cash flow, but offer greater marginal discounts as these borrowers’ cash flow rises. These effects are largely focused on more bank-dependent borrowers. We find some evidence that low-capital banks charge a higher premium for bank-dependent borrowers’ systematic risk, but not for their total equity risk or default risk. Received January 27, 2015; editorial decision July 7, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan.