We propose a method to detect shifts in housing price expectations by observing excess capacity. Anticipated future price hikes lead to increased current supply, resulting in temporary vacancies. Using a structural vector autoregression with sign restrictions, we analyze the impact of these expectations on the U.S. housing market. Our findings indicate that price expectation shocks primarily drove the 1996–2006 boom, especially in the Sand States. At the boom’s peak, these shocks stemmed from unrealistic growth expectations, which reversed during the bust.

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives’ 80% confidence intervals only 36% of the time. We show that executives reduce the lower bound of the forecast confidence interval during times of high market uncertainty; however, ex post miscalibration is worst during periods of high uncertainty. We also find that executives who are miscalibrated about the stock market show similar miscalibration regarding their own firms’ prospects. Finally, firms with miscalibrated executives seem to follow more aggressive corporate policies: investing more and using more debt financing.

We study whether industry familiarity is an advantage in stock trading by exploring the trading patterns of industry insiders in their own personal portfolios. To do so, we identify accounts of industry insiders in a large data set provided by a retail discount broker. We find that insiders trade firms from their own industry more frequently. Furthermore, they earn abnormal returns exclusively when trading own-industry stocks, especially obscure stocks (small, low analyst coverage, high volatility). In a battery of tests, we find no evidence of the use of private information. The results are most consistent with the interpretation that industry familiarity is an advantage in stock trading.

Institutions often offer a menu of contracts to consumers in an attempt to create a separating equilibrium that reveals borrower types and provides better pricing. We test the effectiveness of a specific set of contracts in the mortgage market: mortgage points. Points allow borrowers to exchange an upfront amount for a decrease in the mortgage rate. We document that, on average, points takers lose about $700. Also, points takers are less financially savvy (less educated, older), and they make mistakes on other dimensions (e.g., inefficiently refinancing their mortgages). Overall, our results show that borrowers overestimate how long they will stay with the mortgage.

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008:Q3––Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in volatile and liquid stocks. In comparison, redemptions and stock sales for mutual funds were not as severe. We show that hedge fund investors withdraw capital three times as intensely as mutual fund investors do in response to poor returns. We relate this stronger sensitivity to losses to share liquidity restrictions and institutional ownership in hedge funds.

We measure the effect of a 2006 antipredatory pilot program in Chicago on mortgage default rates to test whether predatory lending was a key element in fueling the subprime crisis. Under the program, risky borrowers or risky mortgage contracts or both triggered review sessions by housing counselors who shared their findings with the state regulator. The pilot program cut market activity in half, largely through the exit of lenders specializing in risky loans and through a decline in the share of subprime borrowers. Our results suggest that predatory lending practices contributed to high mortgage default rates among subprime borrowers, raising them by about a third.

We study the effects of securitization on renegotiation of distressed residential mortgages over the current financial crisis. Unlike prior studies, we employ unique data that directly observe lender renegotiation actions and cover more than 60% of the U.S. mortgage market. Exploiting within-servicer variation in these data, we find that bank-held loans are 26–36% more likely to be renegotiated than comparable securitized mortgages (4.2–5.7% in absolute terms). Also, modifications of bank-held loans are more efficient: conditional on a modification, bank-held loans have 9% lower post-modification default rates (3.5% in absolute terms). Our findings support the view that frictions introduced by securitization create a significant challenge to effective renegotiation of residential loans. We also provide evidence supporting the affordability focus of recent policy actions, such as the Home Affordability Modification Program.

We use short interest as an investor-based measure of over- or undervaluation that distinguishes between the misvaluation and Q-theories of mergers. Using this measure, we find that misvaluation is a strong determinant of merger decision-making. Firms in the top quintile of short interest are 54% more likely to engage in stock acquisitions and 22% less likely to engage in cash acquisitions. Stock (but not cash) acquirers have higher short interest than their targets. Overall, our results suggest that the previously documented underperformance of stock acquirers and the overperformance of cash acquirers can be explained by misvaluation, as captured by short interest.

We study a specific practice of predatory lending: Borrowers being rejected and approved in rapid succession by the same lender. We show that in such cases borrower and contract characteristics and ex post performance are consistent with predatory steering. Steered borrowers are associated with groups with lower financial sophistication. They are more likely to enter non-amortizing contracts with high profit margins that are quickly securitized. Steered borrowers default less in boom years when refinancing is easy. However, their performance deteriorates sharply once falling prices trap them in contracts with rising payments, reflecting the long-term costs of predatory lending.

When borrowers are delinquent, senior debtholders prefer liquidation, whereas junior debtholders prefer to maintain their option value by delaying resolution or modifying the loan. In the mortgage market, a conflict of interest (“holdup”) arises when servicers of securitized senior liens are also the owners of the junior liens on the same property. We show that holdup servicers are able to delay action on the first-lien mortgage. When they do act, servicers are more likely to choose resolutions that maintain their option value, favoring modification and soft foreclosures over outright foreclosures. Holdup behavior is more likely to result in borrower self-curing.