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Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens

Quarterly Journal of Economics 2021 136(3), 1499-1556
Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their true economic location in official statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities issued by firms in tax havens with their issuer's ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better reflect the financial linkages connecting countries around the world. Bilateral portfolio investment from developed countries to firms in large emerging markets is dramatically larger than previously thought. The national accounts of the United States, for example, understate the U.S. position in Chinese firms by nearly $600 billion. Further, we demonstrate how offshore issuance in tax havens affects our understanding of the currency composition of external portfolio liabilities and the nature of foreign direct investment. Finally, we provide additional restatements of bilateral investment positions, including one based on the geographic distribution of sales.

Climate Change and Long-Run Discount Rates: Evidence from Real Estate

Review of Financial Studies 2021 34(8), 3527-3571 open access
We show that housing markets provide information about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. Real estate is exposed to both consumption and climate risk and its term structure of discount rates is downward sloping, reaching 2.6% for payoffs beyond 100 years. We use a tractable asset pricing model that incorporates features of climate change to show that the term structure of discount rates for climate-hedging investments is thus upward sloping but bounded above by the risk-free rate. At horizons at which risk-free rates are unavailable, the estimated housing discount rates provide an upper bound.

Five Facts about Beliefs and Portfolios

American Economic Review 2021 111(5), 1481-1522 open access
We study a newly-designed survey administered to a large panel of wealthy retail investors. The survey elicits beliefs that are important for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with administrative data on their portfolio composition, their trading activity, and their log-in behavior. We establish five facts in this data: (1) Beliefs are reflected in portfolio allocations. The sensitivity of portfolios to beliefs is small on average, but varies significantly with investor wealth, attention, trading frequency, and confidence. (2) Belief changes do not predict when investors trade, but conditional on trading, they affect both the direction and the magnitude of trades. (3) Beliefs are mostly characterized by large and persistent individual heterogeneity. Demographic characteristics explain only a small part of why some individuals are optimistic and some are pessimistic. (4) Expected cash flow growth and expected returns are positively related, both within and across investors. ( These five facts provide useful guidance for the design of macro-finance models.