Knowledge that Transforms

In a calibrated consumption-portfolio model with stock, housing, and labor income predictability, we evaluate the welfare effects of predictability on life-cycle consumption-portfolio choice. We compare skilled investors who are able to take advantage of all sources of predictability with unskilled investors ignoring predictability. For an unskilled investor the certainty equivalent of wealth is 0.3–6.8% lower than for a skilled investor, depending on the market entry date. We also determine the effect of luck to enter the market at a favorable time. Across market entry dates, skilled but unlucky investors can lose up to 15.4% compared to unskilled but lucky investors.

With a large-scale online experiment with 1593 participants from the U.S. and the U.K. we explore whether and how people working in the finance industry and laypeople from the general population are influenced by information on other people’s forecasts when making forecasts on the future development of two indices and two stocks. We find that (i) laypeople’s forecasts are strongly influenced by information they get on other subjects’ forecasts, while financial professionals are much less influenced by information signals; (ii) signals by financial professionals influence all subject groups more than forecasts by laypeople; (iii) we observe a home bias in all subject groups, which can be mitigated by information signals; (iv) all subject groups expect lower forecast errors for financial professionals than for laypeople, hence we find evidence for trust in experts.

In the finance industry, risk compliance has become an important issue after numerous policy violations resulting in significant costs for financial institutions and society as a whole. We run a lab-in-the-field experiment with 269 finance professionals, to investigate the effects of financial incentives and workplace culture on risk compliance. Relative to variable remuneration (linked to expected profits), fixed remuneration increases the proportion of people complying by as much as 25.1 percentage points. This is achieved with no diminution in productivity. Relative to a profit-focused workplace culture, a risk-focused workplace culture increases the proportion of people complying by 16.3 percentage points.

Using a large sample of firms from nine European countries, this study examines the relationship between bank efficiency and the cost of credit for borrowing firms. We hypothesize that bank efficiency – the ability of banks to operate at lower costs – is associated with lower loan rates and thus lower cost of credit. Combining firm-level and bank-level data, we find support for this prediction. The effect of bank efficiency on the cost of credit varies with firm and bank size. Bank efficiency reduces the cost of credit for SMEs, but does not exert a significant influence for either micro companies or large firms. Furthermore, the effect is driven by large banks, where improvements in bank efficiency tend to be strongly associated with lower cost of credit. We also find that lower bank competition facilitates the transmission of greater bank efficiency to lower cost of credit. Overall, our results indicate that measures that increase bank efficiency can foster access to credit.

Lenders reduce their monitoring efforts after hedging their credit risk exposure through credit default swap (CDS) contracts, which are akin to insurance against borrowers’ adverse credit events. In this study, we examine whether, upon observing the reduced lender monitoring following CDS trading, shareholders demand that borrowing firms invest in more aggressive tax planning strategies, which were previously constrained by risk-averse lenders. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the variation in timing of the inception of CDS trading, we document that borrowers exhibit greater tax avoidance after the inception of CDS trading. Consistent with shareholders stepping up their demands post-CDS, we find that the increase in tax avoidance is stronger for (i) firms with more powerful and influential shareholders, as measured by dedicated institutional investors, (ii) firms with stronger shareholder defenders, as measured by board independence and board size, and (iii) firms with more strategic default options. We also find that borrowers with higher levels of tax avoidance are less likely to file for bankruptcy in the future. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, including controlling for cost of debt and endogeneity, as well as using alternative measures of tax avoidance.

This paper investigates whether or not shareholders benefit from corporate social responsibility (CSR) by studying the effect of institutional investors on CSR. After all, arguing against CSR is hard when investors push for it. I find that longer investor horizons lead to significantly more CSR. This positive effect, however, is moderated by long-term investors who hold large ownership blocks. Long-term blockholders ensure, through monitoring, that managers do not blindly increase CSR, but rather that managers pursue a CSR strategy that reduces the risk of costly incidents. A battery of robustness tests indicates causality. Overall, these findings indicate that CSR is in the interests of long-term investors if CSR prevents incidents.

We propose two indicators for quantifying the potential exposure of financial institutions to indirect contagion arising from deleveraging of assets in stress scenarios. The first indicator, the Endogenous Risk Index (ERI) captures spillovers across portfolios arising from deleveraging in stress scenarios. The second indicator, the Indirect Contagion Index (ICI) measures the systemic importance of a bank by quantifying the loss its distressed liquidation would inflict on other institutions. Both are computable from portfolio holdings of financial institutions and measures of market depth for the assets held in the portfolio. We discuss the micro-foundation of these indicators and apply them to the analysis of the vulnerability of the European banking system to indirect contagion. Using data on portfolio holdings of European banks, we show that our indicators correlate to the magnitude of fire-sales losses in simulated stress scenarios, thus providing a simple to compute proxy for the outcome of stress tests. We also show that the information provided by our indicators on the systemic importance of banks is different from indicators based on size, thereby providing a measure of interconnectedness complementary to those currently used by supervisors.

We examine how bank efficiency during normal times affects survival, risk, and profitability during subsequent financial crises using data from five U.S. financial crises and preceding normal times. We find that cost efficiency during normal times helps reduce bank failure probabilities, decrease risk, and enhance profitability during subsequent financial crises, while profit efficiency has limited benefits. Results suggest that cost efficiency better measures management quality, while profit efficiency may partially reflect temporary high returns from risky investments during normal times. Findings have policy implications and imply that improving bank cost efficiency during normal times may promote better financial crisis performance.

The fast-growing literature on news analytics provides evidence that financial markets are partially driven by sentiments. In contrast with previous studies that have almost exclusively focused on the direct effects of the news related to single companies or sectors, we investigate the time-varying dynamics of news’ cross-industry influences for a set of US and European stocks over a period of 10 years. The graphical Granger causality of the news sentiments-excess return networks is estimated by applying the adaptive lasso. We find significant spillover effects and show the importance of sentiments related to certain sectors for the whole cross-section of stocks.

We study whether and how a country's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance relates to its sovereign borrowing costs in international capital markets. We hypothesize that good ESG performance plays an economic role: It signals a country's commitment to sustainability and long-term orientation and is a buffer against negative shocks, leading to lower sovereign bond yield spreads. Using a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1996–2012, we show that countries with good ESG performance are associated with lower default risk and lower sovereign bond yield spreads. Moreover, we show that the social and governance dimensions have a significant negative association with sovereign bond yield spreads, whereas the environmental dimension does not.