We contribute to identifying proxies for the information set of investors in financial markets. We show that the marketwide price-dividend ratio highly correlates with inflation and labor market variables that also forecast consumption, dividend, and GDP growth, but not with aggregate consumption or GDP growth. Our model with learning from inflation and wage earnings rationalizes the moments of consumption and dividend growth, market return, the price-dividend ratio, real and nominal term structures, the low predictive power of the price-dividend ratio for consumption and dividends, and the dynamics of the price-dividend ratio, unlike a nested model with learning from consumption alone. (JEL E3, G12, G14)

We develop a model of liquidity shortages that incorporates a general equilibrium feature of liquidity: when banks hold more liquidity, other agents in the economy hold less of it and will supply less in times of crisis. We show that the private holdings of liquidity at banks are inefficient, with the direction of the bias being determined by the characteristics of the suppliers of liquidity to banks. Minimum liquidity requirements for banks may reduce welfare; in such cases interest rate policies that stimulate the ex-post supply of liquidity can restore efficiency. Overall, our results show that optimal liquidity policies critically depend on a financial institution’s (marginal) source of liquidity and will hence differ across institutions of different types.

We build a general equilibrium model with financial frictions that impede monetary policy transmission. Agents with heterogeneous productivity can increase investment by levering up, which increases liquidity risk due to maturity transformation. In equilibrium, more productive agents choose higher leverage than less productive agents, which exposes the more productive agents to greater liquidity risk and makes their investment less responsive to interest rate changes. When monetary policy reduces interest rates, aggregate investment quality deteriorates, which blunts the monetary stimulus and decreases asset liquidation values. This, in turn, reduces loan demand, decreasing the interest rate further and generating a negative spiral. Overall, the allocation of credit is distorted and monetary stimulus can become ineffective even with significant interest rate drops.

We estimate the effects of the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR), a liquidity requirement for banks, on the tenders that banks submit in Term Deposit Facility operations, a Federal Reserve tool created to manage the quantity of central bank reserves. We identify these effects using variation in LCR requirements across banks and a change over time that allowed term deposits to count toward the LCR. Banks subject to the LCR submit tenders more often and submit larger tenders than exempt banks when term deposits qualify for the LCR. These results suggest that liquidity regulation affects bank demand in monetary policy operations.

Is financial fraud becoming a bigger or smaller problem over time? Current empirical approaches to this question generate mixed inferences. As an alternative, I use two theoretical constructs that isolate several factors that motivate fraud, and use them to consider the impact of technological and wealth changes over time. Some changes, such as an increase in anonymity in some financial transactions, facilitate new fraud innovations and increase the possibility of fraud. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic shutdown has fostered major disruptions in relative demands and organizational capital that also increase the likelihood of fraud over the next few years. Viewed over a longer time scale, however, the majority of technological and wealth changes seem likely to increase the use and effectiveness of reputational capital, third-party enforcement, and ethical motivations as fraud deterrents. I predict that, on net, these changes will drive a long-term decrease in the incidence of fraud.

In this study, we examine the impact of class action litigation shocks on corporate innovation. Our experimental design is based on an unanticipated court ruling that reduces the risk of shareholder class action lawsuits for firms located within the jurisdiction of the US Ninth Circuit. Innovation output by firms headquartered in this area increased significantly after this decision compared with that of firms elsewhere. This result is consistent with our trading hypothesis, which states that the threat of litigation leads to managerial myopia. The increase in innovation is more pronounced at high-tech firms and firms operating in a competitive environment. Other measures of ex ante litigation risk indicate that firms with the greatest litigation risk experience the greatest increase in innovation after this decision. We conclude that a reduction in the threat of class action litigation leads firms to increase innovation.

We introduce an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields that accounts for liquidity risk in Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS). The novel feature of our model is to identify liquidity risk from individual TIPS prices by accounting for the tendency that TIPS, like most fixed-income securities, go into buy-and-hold investors’ portfolios as time passes. We find a sizable and countercyclical TIPS liquidity premium, which helps our model to match TIPS prices. Accounting for liquidity risk also improves the model’s ability to forecast inflation and match surveys of inflation expectations.

We propose a positive model of empirical science in which an analyst makes a report to an audience after observing some data. Agents in the audience may differ in their beliefs or objectives, and may therefore update or act differently following a given report. We contrast the proposed model with a classical model of statistics in which the report directly determines the payoff. We identify settings in which the predictions of the proposed model differ from those of the classical model, and seem to better match practice.

We examine S&P 500 firms over 1999–2014 that characterize their annual performance with extreme positive language. Only 18% of such firms increase shareholder value, while over 80% have either negative or insignificant abnormal returns. Our evidence suggests that firms often base their claims of extreme positive performance on high raw returns or strong relative accounting performance. In comparison to firms that generate positive abnormal returns without boasting, our sample firms tend to have superior accounting performance. We conclude that boasting about performance is rarely associated with value creation and is more consistent with an emphasis on accounting metrics.

Politics may color interpretations of facts, and thus perceptions of risk. We find that a higher share of Trump voters in a county is associated with lower perceptions of risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Controlling for COVID-19 case counts and deaths, as Trump's vote share rises in the local area, individuals search less for information on the virus and its potential economic impacts, and engage in fewer visits to non-essential businesses. Our results suggest that politics and the media may play an important role in determining the formation of risk perceptions, and may therefore affect both economic and health-related reactions to unanticipated health crises.