Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business cycle literature, corporate investments peak during periods of positive sentiment, yet these periods are followed by lower equity returns. This pattern exists in most developed countries and survives controls for discount rates, equity flows, valuation multiples, operating accruals, and other investor sentiment measures. Higher aggregate investments also precede greater earnings disappointments, lower short-window earnings announcement returns, and lower macroeconomic growth. We conclude aggregate corporate investment is an alternative, and possibly sharper, measure of market-wide investor sentiment.

In some cultures vast personal wealth is lauded whereas in others, it is viewed with suspicion and contempt. In recent years, a super rich elite of business people has emerged in China, and, given the country's cultural and socialist past, we believe that people are more likely to react negatively to reports of conspicuous wealth. To test our arguments, we examine the reactions to and consequences of China's entrepreneurs being included on the Hurun Rich List. We find negative consequences for stock market traded firms controlled by the Rich List entrepreneurs: stock prices decline, government subsidies are reduced, and the named entrepreneurs are more likely to be investigated. These effects are strongest in rent-seeking industries and are mitigated by philanthropy.

I examine the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990–1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse's tax rate, each spouse's earnings rise. I compare these results to those of simplified econometric models used in the typical setting in which independent variation in each spouse's tax rate is unavailable. I find that standard econometric specifications may produce substantially biased estimates.

We introduce the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of welfare (living standards) for individuals and populations of possibly different sizes and preferences. It can be used for policy evaluation, international comparisons, growth assessment, and inequality measurement. It even makes it possible to evaluate policy options that affect the size of the population or the preferences of its members. We study how to extend the theory of social choice in order to select such orderings on a rigorous axiomatic basis. We provide foundations for leximin as well as additively separable criteria. Key ingredients in this analysis are fairness principles in social aggregation, attitudes with respect to population size, and the bases of interpersonal comparisons. We discuss how this sheds light on recent developments in the empirical literature on international comparisons.

This article studies optimal monetary policy when decision-makers in firms choose how much attention they devote to aggregate conditions. When the amount of attention that decision-makers in firms devote to aggregate conditions is exogenous, complete price stabilization is optimal only in response to shocks that cause efficient fluctuations under perfect information. When decision-makers in firms choose how much attention they devote to aggregate conditions, complete price stabilization is optimal also in response to shocks that cause inefficient fluctuations under perfect information. Hence, recognizing that decision-makers in firms can choose how much attention they devote to aggregate conditions has major implications for optimal policy.

Using a comprehensive sample of securities litigation, we examine the effect of financial fraud on the subsequent use of external financing. We find that firms with a recent history of securities litigation, particularly more severe litigation, are less likely to seek external debt and equity financing. This negative relationship between prior litigation and external financing is stronger for firms with high information asymmetry. Furthermore, firms significantly reduce their investments in capital expenditures and research and development during the three years following a litigation filing. Thus, the reduction in the availability of external financing due to allegations of financial fraud can have a tangible impact upon the investment opportunities of the firm.

We investigate whether voluntary corporate restrictions on insider trading effectively prevent insiders from exploiting their private information. Our results show that insiders of firms with seeming restrictions on insider trading continue to take advantage of positive private information while being more cautious when exploiting negative private information. The results suggest that insiders continue to exploit their informational advantages in a way that minimizes their legal risk. We also find that the degree of information asymmetry is significantly lower in firms with restriction policies and that corporate governance significantly affects firms' decisions to adopt these policies.

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop computational methods based on mechanism design, linear programming, and maximum likelihood to estimate, compare, and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial/information constraints. Our methods can use both cross-sectional and panel data and allow for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate the models using data on Thai households running small businesses from two separate samples. We find that in the rural sample, the exogenously incomplete saving only and borrowing regimes provide the best fit using data on consumption, business assets, investment, and income. Family and other networks help consumption smoothing there, as in a moral hazard constrained regime. In contrast, in urban areas, we find mechanism design financial/information regimes that are decidedly less constrained, with the moral hazard model fitting best combined business and consumption data. We perform numerous robustness checks in both the Thai data and in Monte Carlo simulations and compare our maximum likelihood criterion with results from other metrics and data not used in the estimation. A prototypical counterfactual policy evaluation exercise using the estimation results is also featured.

We study the trading behavior of investors in an entire stock market. Using an account level dataset of all trades on the Istanbul Stock Exchange in 2005, we identify investors with similar trading behavior as linked in an empirical investor network (EIN). Consistent with the theory of information networks, we find that central investors earn higher returns and trade earlier than peripheral investors with respect to information events. Overall, our results support the view that information diffusion among the investor population influences trading behavior and returns.

This paper examines the impact of the combined U.S. state and federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on homeownership attainment, using data from 1984 to 2007 and exploiting variation in the subsidy arising from changes in the MID within and across states over time. We test whether capitalization of the MID into house prices offsets the positive effect on homeownership. We find that the MID boosts homeownership attainment only of higher-income households in less tightly regulated housing markets. In more restrictive places, an adverse effect exists. The MID is an ineffective policy to promote homeownership and improve social welfare.