Knowledge that Transforms

We explore a new mechanism by which investors take correlated shortcuts and present evidence that managers—using sales management—take advantage of these shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision wherein a firm's primary industry is determined by the highest sales segment. Exploiting this regulation, we provide evidence that investors classify operationally nearly identical firms as starkly different depending on their placement around this sales cutoff. Moreover, managers appear to exploit this by manipulating sales to be just over the cutoff in favorable industries. Further evidence suggests that managers engage in activities to realize large, tangible benefits from this opportunistic action.

Why do value stocks have higher average returns than growth stocks, despite having lower risk? Why do these stocks exhibit positive abnormal performance, while growth stocks exhibit negative abnormal performance? This paper offers a rare-event-based explanation that can also account for the high equity premium and volatility of the aggregate market. The model explains other puzzling aspects of the data, such as joint patterns in time-series predictablity of aggregate market and value and growth returns, long periods in which growth outperforms value, and the association between positive skewness and low realized returns.

We document that the first and third cross-sectional moments of the distribution of GDP growth rates made by professional forecasters can predict equity excess returns, a finding that is robust to controlling for a large set of well-established predictive factors. We show that introducing time-varying skewness in the distribution of expected growth prospects in an otherwise standard endowment economy can substantially increase the model-implied equity Sharpe ratios, and produce a large amount of fluctuation in equity risk premiums.

We investigate why only some banks use regulatory arbitrage. We predict that banks wanting to be riskier than allowed by capital regulations (constrained banks) use regulatory arbitrage, while others do not. We find support for this hypothesis using trust-preferred securities issuance, a form of regulatory arbitrage available to almost all U.S. banks from 1996 to Dodd-Frank. We also find support for predictions that constrained banks are riskier, perform worse during the crisis, and use multiple forms of regulatory arbitrage. We show that neither too-big-to-fail incentives nor misaligned managerial incentives are first-order determinants of this type of regulatory arbitrage.

We propose a hybrid approach for estimating beta that shrinks rolling window estimates toward firm-specific priors motivated by economic theory. Our method yields superior forecasts of beta that have important practical implications. First, unlike standard rolling window betas, hybrid betas carry a significant price of risk in the cross-section even after controlling for characteristics. Second, the hybrid approach offers statistically and economically significant out-of-sample benefits for investors who use factor models to construct optimal portfolios. We show that the hybrid estimator outperforms existing estimators because shrinkage toward a fundamentals-based prior is effective in reducing measurement noise in extreme beta estimates.

We provide new facts on the debt dynamics leading up to the financial crisis of 2007. Earlier research suggests that distortions in the supply of mortgage credit, evidenced by a decoupling of credit flow from income growth, may have caused the rise in house prices and the subsequent housing market collapse. This paper shows that the increase in mortgage originations was shared across the whole distribution of borrowers, and that middle-and high-income borrowers made up the majority of originations even at the peak of the boom. Compared to prior years, middle-and high-income borrowers (not the poor), as well as those with medium and high credit scores, made up a much larger share of delinquencies in the crisis relative to earlier years. We show that the relation between individual mortgage size and income growth during the housing boom was always strongly positive, also in line with previous periods (and independent of how income is measured). These results are most consistent with an expectations based view of the financial crisis in which both homebuyers and lenders were buying into increasing housing values and defaulted once prices dropped.

We analyze a new dataset on workers' career paths to examine whether private equity (PE) investments can have positive spillover effects on workers. We study leveraged buyouts in the context of recent information technology (IT) diffusion, and find evidence supporting the argument that many employees of companies acquired by PE investors gain transferable, IT-complementary human capital. Our estimates indicate that these workers experience increases in both long-run employability and wages relative to what they would have realized in the absence of PE investment. The findings underscore PE's role in mitigating the effects of workforce skill obsolescence due to technological change.

We examine the effect of trust on financial investment and contracting decisions in a micro-economic environment where trust is exogenous. Using hand-collected data on European venture capital, we show that the Eurobarometer measure of trust among nations significantly affects investment decisions. This holds even after controlling for investor and company fixed effects, geographic distance, information and transaction costs. The national identity of venture capital firms' individual partners further contributes to the effect of trust. Education and work experience reduce the effect of trust but do not eliminate it. We also examine the relationship between trust and sophisticated contracts involving contingent control rights and find that, even after controlling for endogeneity, they are complements, not substitutes.

We use neural data collected from an experimental asset market to measure regret preferences while subjects trade stocks. When subjects observe a positive return for a stock they chose not to purchase, a regret signal is observed in an area of the brain that is commonly active during reward processing. Subjects are unwilling to repurchase stocks that have recently increased in price, even though this is suboptimal in our experiment. The strength of stock repurchasing mistakes is correlated with the neural measures of regret. Subjects with high rates of repurchasing mistakes also exhibit large disposition effects.

The search for a market design that ensures stable bank funding is at the top of regulators' policy agenda. This paper empirically shows that the central counterparty (CCP)-based euro interbank repo market features this stability. Using a unique and comprehensive data set, we show that the market is resilient during crisis episodes and may even act as a shock absorber, in the sense that repo lending increases with risk, while spreads, maturities, and haircuts remain stable. Our comparison across different repo markets shows that anonymous CCP-based trading, safe collateral, and the absence of an unwind mechanism are the key characteristics to ensure market resilience.