Using hand-collected data from Form Ds on executives in venture capital (VC)-backed private firms, I show that VC-driven top management changes lead to a significantly greater quantity and quality of innovation, which potentially occurs through new management teams hiring more and higher quality inventors. My evidence demonstrates that both founder replacements and non-founder management changes are associated with enhanced innovation. Further, adding top managers with general managerial skills enhances innovation, whereas changing managers with a prior technical background does not. Finally, top management changes lead to the adoption of an exploitative (rather than explorative) innovation search strategy by private firms.

Does the early-career exposure of bank CEOs to the 1980s savings and loans (S&L) crisis affect the outcomes of banks they subsequently managed? We measure the S&L crisis exposure by the bank failure rate in the states where CEOs worked during the S&L crisis. Armed with this measure, we find that banks managed by CEOs with higher S&L crisis exposure took on less risk and that these banks better survived the financial crisis of 2008. In particular, CEOs adjusted risk attitudes in areas causing the S&L crisis: their more intense crisis experience reduced banks’ interest rate risk, exposure to risky financial innovation and credit risk. We establish the causal interpretation of the findings by evaluating the impact of crisis exposure via CEO hometown states and exploiting quasi-exogenous turnovers due to CEO retirement. Overall, CEOs learned from the past industry crisis which helped curtail their institutions’ risk exposures and enhance later crisis performance.

Abstract We document five novel facts about the role of search effort in forming trading relationships among firms by combining a variety of micro and macro datasets. These facts strongly suggest the presence of search complementarities. To study the implications of these facts for aggregate fluctuations, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model, disciplined by our new firm-level evidence on search effort. The model matches key aspects of the macro and micro data that have remained unaccounted for by standard models, including the time-varying bimodal distribution of output and the strong, nonlinear propagation of shocks. Also, changes to the volatility of shocks have nonlinear effects on macroeconomic fluctuations that advance a novel interpretation of the Great Moderation. Finally, we provide a new account of the state-dependent effects of fiscal policy.

This paper examines the return spillovers between Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and stocks. While traditional approaches focus on proportional relationships between ETFs and their underlying assets, we develop a high-dimensional network framework that captures spillover effects between any ETF-stock pair, regardless of their compositional relationship. By separating idiosyncratic and systematic risks, we investigate potential drivers of contagion. We document substantial heterogeneity in spillover patterns across sectors, which is previously unaddressed in the literature. Sectors such as Utilities and Real Estate exhibit robust spillovers to both their component stocks and assets in other sectors. Conversely, in sectors such as Consumer Discretionary and Finance , cross-sector influences dominate intra-sector ETF-constituent linkages. Our results also highlight that during periods of high market volatility, sources of idiosyncratic contagion become more diverse, suggesting the need for broader market surveillance beyond the few most influential ETFs.

Abstract Previous research finds that EPS growth rates are difficult to predict and reasons that much of the observed cross-sectional variation in valuation ratios is due to variation in implied future stock returns. Yet the observed cross-sectional relation between valuation ratios and realized future stock returns is weak. We revisit these findings using a refined measure of expected EPS growth rates and document robust evidence of predictability in EPS growth rates. Moreover, we find that this predictable growth extends beyond two years into the future and is strongly reflected in observed valuation ratios. We show that combining valuation ratios with our refined measure of expected EPS growth rates improves forecasts of stock returns, though return predictability remains weak. Thus, we conclude that most of the variation in valuation ratios is driven by predictable EPS growth.

Abstract Our study reveals that financial analysts issue more pessimistic forecasts for their investment banking clients' competitors than for unrelated firms. Our evidence is consistent with this behavior stemming from analysts' strategic incentives rather than their true beliefs. We find that analysts' pessimism for the client's competitors is more pronounced when the client is more important to analysts' brokerage houses, when high uncertainty prevents competitors from detecting analysts' strategic motives, and when analysts' brokerage houses are less prestigious. Additionally, we explore the economic consequences of the pessimism from the perspectives of the covered firms, brokerage houses, and financial analysts. Finally, we consider the impact of the 2003 Global Analyst Research Settlement. Overall, our results demonstrate that issuing pessimistic forecasts for clients' competitors is an understudied channel through which analysts curry favor with their investment banking clients.

Sell-side analysts rate on a particular type of behavioral curve: recency. Although they claim to use objective criteria (like expected raw, market-adjusted, or industry-adjusted returns), we find that, even after controlling for these claims, their recommendations on a particular stock are negatively influenced by their assessment of the quality of the few other stocks they have rated that month. This recency bias has price implications. The next day's alpha of a sophisticated trading strategy that incorporates this bias is about 40 % higher compared to the alpha of an unsophisticated strategy that uses rating information only.

ABSTRACT We examine the effect of internal employee coordination on customer trust, focusing specifically on employees’ responsiveness to each other as an important, quantifiable, and objective aspect of internal coordination. Using proprietary data from a company with exogenous assignment of employees to teams that serve individual customers, we study how inter‐employee responsiveness influences customer trust. Each customer is served via an app‐based group chat by a randomly assigned team of employees. Our data include more than 2 million group chat messages with over 16 thousand customers. We find that inter‐employee responsiveness serves as a credible signal that helps build customer trust, as evidenced by their subsequent contracting choices. The effect is more pronounced when the signal is (1) more frequent and (2) more intense. Our findings highlight the novel value of internal employee responsiveness as a credible signal that helps build trust with external stakeholders.

Over the recent decade or so, the Chinese government implemented a commercial reform that features governmental application of digital technologies to acquire and process firm information. The core objective of commercial reform is to improve information transparency and monitoring on corporate commercial activities. To explore the economic effectiveness of the reform, we examine how it impacts firms' stock price crash risk. We find robust evidence that the commercial reform that digitalizes government regulatory activities mitigates stock price crash risk and achieves so via enhancing information environment and monitoring for firms. This finding is more prominent for firms with higher levels of digitalization and innovation and those with weaker internal governance. Overall, our findings highlight a potential benefit of applying digital technologies to regulatory reform, encouraging governments to adopt digital tools to improve information environments and monitoring for firms, and thereby promoting a more stable and efficient capital market.

We examine quantitative investors’ ability to navigate a common and occasionally material change to the financial data generating process: new accounting standards. Returns of quantitative mutual funds temporarily decrease relative to funds that rely more heavily on human discretion following the implementation of a few standards that significantly change key financial statement variables; however, other standards do not appear to have a differential effect. Our result is stronger for quantitative funds using more accounting terminology in their prospectuses and using value strategies, which leverage accounting signals. Excess portfolio turnover following the implementation of accounting standards appears to be a driving factor of the quant underperformance. Additional evidence connects the fund-level results to the specific stocks that were affected by the accounting standards. Overall, our results suggest quant funds are generally proficient at adapting to accounting changes, although material changes occasionally put them at a temporary disadvantage relative to discretionary investors.