Knowledge that Transforms

Using data spanning the twentieth century, we show that the majority of accounting-based return anomalies, including investment, are most likely an artifact of data snooping. When examined out-of-sample by moving either backward or forward in time, the average returns and Sharpe ratios of most anomalies decrease, whereas their volatilities and correlations with other anomalies increase. The few anomalies that do persist out-of-sample correlate with the shift from investment in physical capital to intangible capital and the increasing reliance on debt financing over the twentieth century. Received November 25, 2016; editorial decision September 23, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

Are standard structural models able to explain credit spreads on corporate bonds? In contrast to much of the literature, we find that the Black-Cox model matches the level of investment-grade spreads well. Model spreads for speculative-grade debt are too low, and we find that bond illiquidity contributes to this underpricing. Our analysis makes use of a new approach for calibrating the model to historical default rates that leads to more precise estimates of investment-grade default probabilities. Received October 25, 2016; editorial decision January 12, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

We explore the causes of the credit crunch during the European sovereign debt crisis and its impact on the corporate policies of European firms. Our results show that value impairment in banks’ exposures to sovereign debt and the risk-shifting behavior of weakly capitalized banks reduced the probability of firms being granted new syndicated loans by up to 53%. This lending contraction depressed investment, employment, and sales growth of firms affiliated with affected banks. Our estimates based on firm-level data suggest that the credit crunch explains between 44% and 66% of the overall negative real effects suffered by European firms. Received April 5, 2016; editorial decision February 3, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

We construct firm-level indexes for agency conflicts between controlling shareholders and outside investors by estimating a dynamic model of financing decisions. Our estimates for 12,652 firms from 14 countries show that agency conflicts are large and highly variable across firms and countries. Differences in agency conflicts are largely due to differences in firm-level governance, ownership concentration, and other firm characteristics. The origin of law is more relevant for curtailing governance excesses than for guarding the typical firm. Agency costs split about equally between wealth transfers and value losses from policy distortions. Recent governance reforms in Europe have significantly reduced agency costs.

We use a very accurate panel of all individual spending, income, balances, and credit limits from a personal finance software to document spending responses to the arrival of both regular and irregular income. These payday responses are robust and homogeneous for all income and spending categories throughout the income distribution. Moreover, we find that few people hold little or no liquidity. We then analyze whether people hold liquidity cushions to cope with future liquidity constraints. However, we find that peoples’ responses are consistent with standard models without illiquid savings, in which neither present nor future liquidity constraints are frequently binding. Received May 31, 2016; editorial decision September 30, 2017 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

We employ a novel brokerage account data set to investigate which individual investors are the most attentive, how investors allocate their attention, and the relation between investor attention and performance. Attention is positively related to investment performance, at both the portfolio return level and the individual trades level. We provide evidence that the superior performance of high-attention investors arises because they purchase attentiongrabbing stocks whose positive performance persists for up to six months. Finally, we show that paying attention is particularly profitable when trading stocks with high uncertainty, but for which a lot of public information is available. (

When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs - for example, by relaxing students' funding constraints. To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.

We find that CEOs release 20% more discretionary news items in months in which they are expected to sell equity, predicted using scheduled vesting months. These vesting months are determined by equity grants made several years prior and thus unlikely to be driven by the current information environment. The increase arises for positive news, but not neutral or negative news, nor nondiscretionary news. News releases fall in the month before and month after the vesting month. News in vesting months generates a temporary increase in stock prices and market liquidity, which the CEO exploits by cashing out shortly afterwards.

This paper develops first measures of housing sentiment for 34 cities across the United States by quantifying the qualitative tone of local housing news. Housing media sentiment has significant predictive power for future house prices, leading prices by nearly two years. Consistent with theories of investor sentiment, the media sentiment index has a greater effect in markets in which speculative investors are more prevalent and demand appears less informed. Directly examining the content across news articles finds that results are not driven by news stories of unobserved fundamentals.

We show that the martingale component in the long-term factorization of the stochastic discount factor due to Alvarez and Jermann (2005) and Hansen and Scheinkman (2009) is highly volatile, produces a downward-sloping term structure of bond Sharpe ratios, and implies that the long bond is far from growth optimality. In contrast, the long forward probabilities forecast an upward sloping term structure of bond Sharpe ratios that starts from zero for short-term bonds and implies that the long bond is growth optimal. Thus, transition independence and degeneracy of the martingale component are implausible assumptions in the bond market.