Knowledge that Transforms

We present a new database of banking-crisis interventions, covering 1,946 interventions in 20 categories across 143 countries. We demonstrate that crisis-intervention patterns are significantly related to income and fiscal variables and to measures of the political system and currency regime. GDP losses following crises are economically significant and are larger for wealthier countries, with some evidence that these losses are mitigated by democratic political systems and liberal currency regimes. Finally, intervention frequencies reached an apex during the post–Bretton Woods era, continuing a secular increase since at least the late seventeenth century.

This paper examines CEO pay at nonprofits. Using compensation data for 14,111 nonprofits, we find that CEO pay dropped by 2% after legislation in New York reduced CEOs’ ability to influence their own pay. Despite lower pay, CEOs exerted more effort, and nonprofit performance improved. The effects were stronger at commercial nonprofits than at charities and for male CEOs than female CEOs. These findings are consistent with a model where some nonprofit CEOs derive meaning from their work and compensation can be rigged. Overall, our results suggest that regulation that targets the pay-setting process can improve organizational outcomes at nonprofits.

I test whether asset prices reflect risk exposures of financial intermediaries in a setting well-suited to tackling concerns about omitted risk factors. I analyze catastrophe bonds whose cash flows are linked to natural disasters and find that 71% of the security-level variation in expected returns can be explained by a theoretically motivated measure of intermediaries’ marginal utility. Assuming natural disasters are independent of aggregate wealth, this result is inconsistent with any alternative explanation based on unobserved macroeconomic risks. In addition, the aggregate premium decreases and becomes less sensitive to the occurrence of disasters when intermediaries’ access to outside capital improves.

We analyze the role of nonbank lenders in the transmission of monetary policy using data on the universe of unsecured credit to firms and households in Denmark. Nonbanks increase their credit supply after a monetary contraction, both relative to banks and in absolute terms. The increase in nonbank lending is financed through increased long-term debt. A model with segmented debt markets featuring differential investor rate sensitivities rationalizes these findings. Nonbank credit insulates corporate investment and household consumption from monetary contractions, with positive spillovers extending beyond nonbank clients through industry and geographic channels.

We show that socially responsible investors can have a negative impact by slowing the pace of firm reform. Investors with broad prosocial preferences value acquiring dirty firms with high negative production externalities because they can reform these firms. The anticipation of trading gains for dirty firms decreases the incentive of current firm owners to reduce externalities proactively, potentially causing delay in reform. The presence of financial investors—alongside socially responsible investors—can exacerbate delay. Investment mandates through which socially responsible investors commit to paying a premium for green firms can incentivize reform in a timely manner.

This paper introduces a key factor influencing households’ decision to invest in the stock market: how people view stockholders. Using surveys we conducted with nearly 8,500 individuals from 11 countries, we document that a large majority hold negative views of stockholders based on identity-relevant characteristics. Linking survey and administrative data, we find that negative perceptions strongly predict households’ stock market participation. We show that negative perceptions causally influence household decision-making and provide evidence supporting identity concerns as the underlying mechanism. Our findings provide new perspectives on the malleability of financial decision-making and a novel explanation for low stock market participation.

Why do individuals pay debt interest when they could use their savings to pay down the debt? We explore why individuals “cohold” debt and savings using detailed and highly disaggregated daily-level data on household finances. We find that coholding mostly occurs in short spells within the month and the level of coholding is typically modest. Periods of coholding are not associated with shocks at the individual level. We show that mental accounting has a role to play in explaining coholding, in particular how individuals allocate different categories of expenditure to accounts in credit and debit.

We develop a dynamic theory of “Partial Equilibrium Thinking” (PET), which micro-founds time-varying return extrapolation: extrapolative beliefs are present at all times, but only sometimes manifest themselves in explosive ways. We formalize the distinction between normal times shocks and “displacement shocks,” and study their interaction with extrapolative beliefs. In normal times, PET generates constant extrapolation and momentum. After a displacement shock that increases uncertainty, PET leads to stronger and time-varying extrapolation, triggering bubbles and endogenous crashes. Our theory sheds light on both market dynamics in normal times and Kindleberger’s narrative of bubbles within a unified framework.

This paper investigates how capital supply from mutual funds affects municipal bond financing, making three key contributions. First, we introduce an identification strategy using the rule-based update of Morningstar ratings for 5-year-old funds, isolating supply-side effects from fund and issuer fundamentals. The results indicate that exogenous fund flows increase bond issuance probability and decrease yields. Second, these fund flows lead to more issuances when funds and issuers are connected through underwriters, highlighting relationship lending in municipal bond financing. Third, municipal issuers leverage favorable financing conditions for new issuance of revenue bonds, which translates into higher local house prices.

We examine the role of insurance companies in supporting resiliency in the corporate bond market. We show that during the COVID-19 liquidity crisis, insurers increased their corporate bond positions, particularly in bonds facing fire sales by mutual funds. Insurers with more stable funding were more likely to buy, and they bought more from dealers with whom they had prior trading relationships. Dealers improved their bond liquidity provision when they had trading relationships with insurers with more stable funding. Our work demonstrates that insurers can play an important role in supporting bond market resiliency during times of stress.