This paper uses newly available data on plant level regulatory status linked to the Census Longitudinal Business Database to measure the impact of changes in county level environmental regulations on plant and sector employment levels. Estimates from a variety of specifications suggest a strong connection between changes in environmental regulatory stringency and both employment growth and levels in the affected sectors. The preferred estimates suggest that changes in county level regulatory status due to the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments reduced the size of the regulated sector by as much as 15 percent in the 10 years following the changes.

[Investors rebalance their portfolios as their views about expected returns and risk change. We use empirical measures of portfolio rebalancing to back out investors' views, specifically, their views about the state of the economy. We show that aggregate portfolio rebalancing across equity sectors is consistent with sector rotation, an investment strategy that exploits perceived differences in the relative performance of sectors at different stages of the business cycle. The empirical footprint of sector rotation has predictive power for the evolution of the economy and future bond market returns, even after controlling for relative sector returns. Contrary to many theories of price formation, trading activity, therefore, contains information that is not entirely revealed by resulting relative price changes.]

[Using a dataset of 28,635 firms in 45 countries, this study investigates the motivations for family-controlled business groups. We provide new evidence consistent with the argument that particular group structures emerge not only to perpetuate control, but also to alleviate financing constraints at the country and firm levels. At the country level, family groups, especially those structured as pyramids, are more prevalent in markets with limited availability of capital. At the firm level, investment intensity is greater for firms held in pyramidal rather than in horizontal structures, reflecting the financing advantages of the former. Within a pyramid, internal equity funding, investment intensity, and firm value all increase down the ownership chain. However, group firm performance declines when dual-class shares and cross shareholdings are employed as additional control-enhancing mechanisms.]

We use a novel data set to study return predictability in debt markets. The data are collected from J.P. Morgan’s periodic surveys on its clients’ outlook for changes in US Treasury yields and corporate credit spreads. We document that simple signals constructed from such surveys predict excess returns on debt portfolios formed on the basis of duration (2-years minus zero) or credit quality (BBB minus AAA). A linear trading strategy placing equal weight on Treasury and Credit signals has an annualized Information Ratio equal to 1.18, before transaction costs. We also show that predictability is likely to stem from private information possessed by survey respondents rather than from risk premia.

This study investigates whether financial intermediaries (FIs) participating in the IPO process play a significant role in restraining earnings management (EM). Specifically, we examine whether EM around IPOs is negatively related to investment banks (IBs) and venture capital (VC) investor reputations. In general, we do not find evidence that VCs as a group significantly restrain EM by IPO issuers. However, we uncover strong evidence that more reputable VCs and IBs are associated with significantly less EM, which is consistent with them implicitly certifying the quality of issuer financial reports. Moreover, a stronger reduction in EM is found when more reputable IBs are matched with more reputable VCs, which indicates that VC and IB reputation are complements rather than substitutes. These conclusions are invariant to adjustments for potential endogeneity of underwriter reputation and VC-backing or reputation.

Young agents with low wealth-income ratios counter factually hold more stock than young, rich agents and old agents using the standard portfolio choice model with i.i.d. stock returns and labor income. This paper matches the countercyclical volatility and procyclical mean of U.S. labor income and finds that, consistent with U.S. data, young, poor agents now hold less stock than both young, rich agents and old agents, and no stock a large fraction of the time. Our results suggest that the predictability of labor income growth at a business-cycle frequency, particularly the countercyclical variation in volatility, plays an important role in a young agent's decision making about her portfolio's stock holding.

Racial restrictive covenants are private agreements prohibiting sale, rental, use or occupancy of properties by persons of designated races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions. Widely acknowledged for facilitating residential segregation, the Supreme Court ruled covenants unenforceable in 1948. Yet they remained legal to write and reference, allowing realtors, banks, insurers, title companies and government agencies to continue to rely on unenforceable covenants in their decisions and policies. Beyond legal enforceability, covenants were essentially signals that coordinated the behavior of a variety of private individual and institutional actors—signals that remained effective without the courts. Evidence is presented to support this claim.

This paper uses restricted census microdata to examine housing values and rents for neighborhoods in the United States where power plants were opened during the 1990s. Compared to neighborhoods with similar housing and demographic characteristics, neighborhoods within 2 miles of plants experienced 3%–7% decreases in housing values and rents, with some evidence of larger decreases within 1 mile and for large-capacity plants. In addition, there is evidence of taste-based sorting, with neighborhoods near plants associated with modest but statistically significant decreases in mean household income, educational attainment, and the proportion owner-occupied.