Knowledge that Transforms

We assess how investors’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for sustainable investments responds to the social impact of those investments, using a framed field experiment. While investors have a substantial WTP for sustainable investments, they do not pay significantly more for more impact. This also holds for dedicated impact investors. When investors compare several sustainable investments, their WTP responds to relative, but not to absolute, levels of impact. Regardless of investments’ impact, investors experience positive emotions when choosing sustainable investments. Our findings suggest that the WTP for sustainable investments is primarily driven by an emotional, rather than a calculative, valuation of impact.

This paper documents an unprecedented decrease in young homeownership since the Great Recession driven by regions with high house prices. Using a panel of U.S. metro areas, I calibrate an equilibrium spatial macro-finance model with overlapping generations of mobile households. The dynamics of regional housing markets is explained by an aggregate credit contraction with heterogeneous local impacts rather than by local shocks. Lower millennial income and wealth amplify its effect. The impact of subsidies to first-time buyers is dampened, because they fail to stimulate regions that suffer from larger busts. Place-based subsidies achieve larger gains.

We study the impact of the refinancing channel of monetary policy on very small and medium-sized businesses. Using data covering the near universe of these businesses, we find that increased household refinancing reduces the probability that a business exits or exhausts its debt capacity in the calendar year, as well as 6 years after the first exposure. It also helps younger businesses maintain credit relationships. Financial factors, like business liquidity, as well as local demand dependence, amplify these effects, especially for very small businesses. These results suggest that the refinancing channel of monetary policy can have large long-run effects on local economies.

Firms in younger labor markets produce more innovation. We establish this by instrumenting the current labor force with historical births in each local labor market in the United States. Analyses of firms and inventors allow us to rule out unobservable heterogeneity across local labor markets and firms, life cycles, and other effects. Corporate innovation in younger labor markets reflects the innovative characteristics of younger labor forces, and its market value is higher. Younger workers as a group, not merely inventors by themselves, produce more innovation for firms through the labor force channel rather than through a financing or consumption channel.

We study the relation between trade credit, asset prices, and production-network linkages. Empirically, firms extending more trade credit earn 7.6% p.a. lower risk premiums and maintain longer relationships with customers. Using a production-based model, we quantitatively explain these novel facts. Trade credit reduces the departure probability of high-quality customers, thereby reducing firms’ exposures to systematic costs incurred in finding new customers. The mechanism predicts that the aggregate amount of trade credit proxies for customer-search costs and that suppliers with shorter-duration links to customers command higher expected returns. We confirm these and other novel predictions in the data.

We study under which circumstances firms choose to install boards and their roles in a historical setting in which neither boards nor their duties are mandated by law. Boards arise in firms with large, heterogeneous shareholder bases. We propose that an important role of boards is to mediate between heterogeneous shareholders with divergent interests. Voting restrictions are common and ensure that boards are representative and not captured by large blockholders. Boards are given significant powers to both mediate and monitor management, and these roles are intrinsically linked.

For a firm that cannot raise external funds, cash on hand serves as precautionary saving. We derive a closed-form expression for the target level of cash on hand in the presence of persistent cash flows. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mean-preserving increase in the volatility of cash flow can decrease this target. Over the set of admissible parameter values, the average impact of volatility on the target is zero. Endogenous selection, reflecting termination of firms that run out of cash, leads to a positive average impact of volatility on the target level of cash, consistent with empirical findings.

Postcrisis bank regulations raised market-making costs for bank-affiliated dealers. We show that this can, somewhat surprisingly, improve overall investor welfare and reduce average transaction costs despite the increased cost of immediacy. Bank dealers in OTC markets optimize between two parallel trading mechanisms: market making and matchmaking. Bank regulations that increase market-making costs change the market structure by intensifying competitive pressure from nonbank dealers and incentivizing bank dealers to shift their business activities toward matchmaking. Thus, postcrisis bank regulations have the (unintended) benefit of replacing costly bank balance sheets with a more efficient form of financial intermediation.

We analyze the partisanship of Commissioners at the SEC and Governors at the Federal Reserve Board. Using recent advances in machine learning, we identify partisan phrases in Congress, such as “red tape” and “climate change,” and observe their usage among regulators. Although the Fed has remained relatively nonpartisan throughout our sample period (1930–2019), we find that partisanship among SEC Commissioners rose to an all-time high during the 2010-2019 period, driven by more-partisan Commissioners replacing less-partisan ones. Partisanship at the SEC appears in both the language of new SEC rules and the voting behavior of SEC Commissioners.

How does creditor health affect the pass-through of monetary policy to households? Using data on the universe of U.S. credit unions, I document that creditor asset losses increase the sensitivity of consumer credit to monetary policy. Identification exploits plausibly exogenous variation in asset losses and high-frequency identification of monetary policy shocks. Weaker lenders can respond more if they face financial frictions that easing alleviates. The estimates imply constraints on monetary policy become more costly in financial crises featuring creditor asset losses and that an additional benefit of monetary easing is that it weakens the causal, contractionary effect of asset losses.