We provide evidence regarding mutual funds’ motivation to hold lottery stocks. Funds with higher managerial ownership invest less in lottery stocks, suggesting that managers themselves do not prefer such stocks. The evidence instead supports that managers cater to fund investors’ preference for such stocks. In particular, funds with more lottery holdings attract larger flows after portfolio disclosure compared with their peers, and poorly performing funds tend to engage in risk shifting by increasing their lottery holdings toward year-ends. Funds’ aggregate holdings of lottery stocks contribute to their overpricing.

In a model where investors disagree about the fundamentals of two stocks, the state-price density depends on investor disagreements for both stocks, especially the larger stock. This implies that disagreement among investors in a large firm has a spillover effect on the pricing of other stocks owned by these investors. The pricing effects of investor disagreements crucially depend on the average belief biases. Empirical findings support the novel model prediction of a disagreement spillover effect and help reconcile some mixed evidence in the literature.

A firm׳s investment in corporate social responsibility (CSR) builds a positive image of caring for social good and imposes additional costs on executives׳ informed trading, which is widely perceived self-serving. We thus expect executives of CSR-conscious firms to be more likely to refrain from informed trading. We find that executives of CSR-conscious firms profit significantly less from insider trades and are less likely to trade prior to future news than executives of non-CSR-conscious firms. The negative association between CSR and insider trading profits is more pronounced when executives׳ personal interests are more aligned with the interests of the firm.

Why did the failure of Lehman Brothers make the financial crisis dramatically worse? Our answer is that the financial crisis was a process of a build-up of risk during the crisis prior to the Lehman failure. During the crisis market participants tried to preserve an option to withdraw by shortening maturities — the “flight from maturity”. We show that the flight from maturity was manifested in a steepening of the term structures of spreads in money markets. With increasingly short maturities, lenders created the possibility of fast exit. The failure of Lehman Brothers was the tipping point of this build-up of systemic fragility. A crisis is a dynamic process in which “tail risk” is endogenous.

We exploit the impact of hurricane Katrina on insurance companies to study the relationship between bondholder concentration and credit risk. Redemption-driven sales by property and casualty (re)insurance companies exposed to hurricane Katrina are associated with a large drop in bondholder concentration faced by corporate bond issuers. Exploiting this shock to capture exogenous variation in bondholder concentration, we find that greater bondholder concentration is associated with higher bond yield spreads, as well as with firm characteristics associated with credit risk.

We examine the effect of the bond capital supply uncertainty of institutional investors (e.g., mutual bond funds and insurance companies) on the leverage of the firm using a novel data set. Our main finding is that the supply uncertainty of the firm's bond investor base — measured as (i) the average portfolio turnover, or (ii) the average flow volatility of investors holding the firm's bonds, or (iii) the prevalence of mutual funds among the firm's bondholders as opposed to insurance companies — has a negative and significant effect on the leverage of the firm. The supply uncertainty of the firm's bond investor base also has a negative and significant effect on the firm's probability of issuing bonds, and a positive and significant effect on the firm's probability of issuing equity and borrowing from banks. We take a multi-pronged approach to address potential endogeneity issues, including use of geography-based instruments and firm fixed effects, subsample analyses, and a placebo test. Our results highlight the fragility of access to the bond market for companies that depend on mutual funds with high turnover/ flow volatility as primary bond investors.

Debates on the double taxation of dividends and corporate income have been long-standing. If double taxation were to be avoided, which type of tax policy would be more ideal? Conventional corporate theory based on microeconomic approaches does not yield a definitive answer, as either policy would distort firm investment and decrease firm value. Distinct from previous models, this paper addresses the double taxation issue in a macroeconomic context under a Laibson-type hyperbolic discounting model. In particular, this paper shows that in the hyperbolic economy, dividend taxes can improve consumer welfare, even though they decrease firm value. On the other hand, corporate income taxes negatively impact both consumers and firms. We also extend this result in an infinite-period steady-state model and show quantitative implications.

This study investigates the role of risk in determining the cost efficiency of international banks in eight emerging Asian countries. Researchers of this paper consider three distinct risk aspects under a total of eight risk measures: credit risk, operational risk, and market risk. We apply a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model to estimate bank cost efficiency in our analysis. Additionally, this study analyzes the marginal effects of all risk measures on the inefficiency effect in order to explore a more detailed relationship between risks and efficiency. The empirical results indicate that the risk measures represent significant effects on both the level and variability of bank efficiency. We also find that these effects vary across countries and over time.

We document the importance of political promotion incentives for supervisors in banking supervision. Utilizing the merger of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) in 2018, we explore the actions of head of the CBRC's regional offices. We find that the increased political promotion incentives are associated with higher frequency, greater amount, and greater severity of penalties in regional banking supervision. The enhanced supervision is more remarkable when the head of the CBRC's regional offices has a higher political rank. After the merger of the two commissions, the regional banking supervision is significantly weakened with the disappearance of political promotion incentives. Furthermore, these enhanced regional supervision triggered by the merger event reduce bank risk. Our findings show that the increased political promotion incentives affect the supervisor's activities and improve the supervision effectiveness.

The Chinese government broke its long-standing practice of bond bailouts in March 2014. The number and value of bond defaults increased substantially in the following years. We investigate bond defaults in China from 2014 to 2019 and examine the impact of no-bailout reform. We find significantly higher yield spreads on lower-rated bonds over AAA bonds after the policy change. Furthermore, we document much lower default rates for SOE bonds than non-SOE bonds and an increased funding advantage of SOEs after March 2014. Surprisingly, credit rating agencies loosened rating standards in response to the policy change, suggesting their caving into issuer demands for higher ratings.