This study extends Acharya and Naqvi’s (2012) theory of liquidity-driven risk-taking to digital asset markets by examining the relationship between U.S. and Chinese excess-liquidity conditions and cryptocurrency returns. Using monthly panel data for ten major cryptocurrencies from 2019 to 2024, and defining excess liquidity and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) as binary state indicators, the baseline results show that periods of U.S. excess liquidity are associated with a 12.1 percentage-point increase in average monthly cryptocurrency returns. This liquidity-return premium is reduced by approximately 54% during episodes of rising U.S. EPU. Chinese excess-liquidity regimes are associated with a 9.3 percentage-point increase in monthly returns, but this positive association is more than offset under rising Chinese policy uncertainty, as indicated by a −13.8 percentage-point interaction effect. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that surplus-liquidity conditions coincide with stronger cryptocurrency returns, in line with risk-taking and stablecoin-based arbitrage channels, whereas rising-EPU regimes weaken the liquidity-return relationship by increasing risk aversion and reducing arbitrage efficiency. The results highlight a macro-financial channel through which liquidity conditions are linked to digital asset markets and suggest that regulators should monitor stablecoin issuance, leverage, funding conditions, and liquidity-driven speculative pressure in the crypto market.

The large increase in common institutional ownership has raised legitimate antitrust concerns. While the exact channel by which common institutional shareholders might influence firm policy remains unclear, a prominent potential mechanism is corporate board representation. Using hand-collected data on shareholders' board representation, we show that instances of institutional investors simultaneously holding board positions in rival companies are exceedingly rare and do not account for the positive correlation between common institutional ownership and firm-pair profitability. Our findings suggest that board representation by institutional investors is unlikely to represent an empirically potent channel of influence on corporate policy.

In this paper, we study the asset pricing implications of persistence in the risk-neutral return distribution’s central moments. We detect a both economically and statistically significant premium of stocks with low over stocks with high such persistence. Annual value-weighted excess (risk-adjusted) returns are 4.38% (3.06%). These results cannot be explained by factors and characteristics documented in the previous literature. Furthermore, it is not the persistence of only one of the individual distributional moments but rather the joint persistence in all central moments of the risk-neutral distribution that is priced.