A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

• Zhu, M. (2018). Informative Fund Size Managerial Skill and Investor Rationality. Journal of Financial Economics, 130, 114–134.

  This paper considers the nature of returns to scale in active management following Pástor et al. (2015) who fail to establish diseconomies of scale at the fund level. Using an enhanced empirical strategy, we find a significant negative impact of fund size on performance. This empirical evidence indicates that fund alpha and fund size are not independent entities. Consequently, skill, rather than being measured by the fund alpha, should be measured by the value that a fund extracts from capital markets. We also show that there exist sophisticated investors who correctly exploit positive net present value investment opportunities.

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• You, J., Zhang, B., & Zhang, L. (2018). Who Captures the Power of the Pen? Review of Financial Studies, 31, 43–96.

  We study how government control affects the roles of the media as an information intermediary and a corporate monitor. Comparing a large sample of news articles written by state-controlled and market-oriented Chinese media, we find that articles by the market-oriented media are more critical, more accurate, more comprehensive, and timelier than those by the state-controlled media. Moreover, only articles by the market-oriented media have a significant corporate governance impact. Subsample analyses, interviews with journalists, and a survey of university students suggest that the market-oriented media’s superior effects are explained by their operating efficiency and independence.

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• Yao, C., & Ye, M. (2018). Why Trading Speed Matters: A Tale of Queue Rationing under Price Controls. Review of Financial Studies, 31, 2157–2183.

  We show that queue rationing under price controls is one driver of high-frequency trading. Uniform tick sizes constrain price competition and create rents for liquidity provision, particularly for securities with lower prices. The time priority rule allocates rents to high-frequency traders (HFTs) because of their speed advantage. An increase in relative tick size, defined as uniform tick sizes divided by security prices, increases the fraction of liquidity provided by HFTs but harms liquidity. We find that the message-to-trade ratio is a poor cross-sectional proxy for HFTs’ liquidity provision: stocks with more liquidity provided by HFTs have lower message-to-trade ratios.

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• Xu, Q. (2018). Kicking Maturity Down the Road: Early Refinancing and Maturity Management in the Corporate Bond Market. Review of Financial Studies, 31, 3061–3097.

  This paper examines debt maturity management through early refinancing, where firms retire their outstanding bonds before the due date and simultaneously issue new ones as replacements. Speculative-grade firms frequently refinance their corporate bonds early to extend maturity, particularly under accommodating credit supply conditions, leading to a procyclical maturity structure. In contrast, investment-grade firms do not manage their maturity in the same manner. I exploit the protection period of callable bonds to show that the maturity extension is not driven by unobservable confounding factors. The evidence is consistent with speculative-grade firms dynamically managing maturity to mitigate refinancing risk.

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• Xu, G. (2018). The Costs of Patronage: Evidence from the British Empire. American Economic Review, 108, 3170–3198.

  I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial administration for the period 1854-1966 to study how patronage affects the promotion and incentives of governors. Governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. Once allocated, they provide more tax exemptions, raise less revenue, and invest less. The promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage appointments. Patronage therefore distorts the allocation of public sector positions and reduces the incentives of favored bureaucrats to perform.

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• Wu, Y. (2018). What’s behind Smooth Dividends? Evidence from Structural Estimation. Review of Financial Studies, 31, 3979–4016.

  I study the driving forces behind dividend smoothing by developing a dynamic agency model in which dividends signal the earnings persistence of firms. In equilibrium, managers treat dividends and earnings as informational substitutes. They smooth dividends relative to earnings to smooth negative news releases and lower their turnover risk. Empirical estimates of the model parameters imply that 39% of observed dividend smoothness among U.S. firms is driven by managers’ own career concerns, not shareholders’ preferences. Managers cut investments and adjust external financing policies to accommodate this career-concern-based dividend smoothing. These effects lead to a 2% decline in firm value.

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• Wong, M. (2018). CMBS and Conflicts of Interest: Evidence From Ownership Changes for Servicers. The Journal of Finance, 73, 2425–2458.

  Self‐dealing is potentially important but difficult to measure. In this paper, I study special servicers in commercial mortgage‐backed securities (CMBS), which sell distressed assets on behalf of bondholders. Around 2010, ownership changes of four major servicers raised concerns that they may direct benefits to new owners' affiliates (buyers and service providers). Loans liquidated after ownership changes have greater loss rates than before (8 percentage points (p.p.), $2.3 billion in losses), relative to other (placebo) servicers. Together with a case study that tracks self‐dealing purchases, the findings point to potential steering conflicts that could incentivize tunneling through fees to service providers.

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• Wollmann, T. G. (2018). Trucks without Bailouts: Equilibrium Product Characteristics for Commercial Vehicles. American Economic Review, 108, 1364–1406.

  The entry and exit of products, rather than firms, serve as the main equilibrating force in many markets, so accurately predicting changes from a merger or bankruptcy should incorporate this behavior. This paper estimates a structural model of the US commercial vehicle market and demonstrates the importance of allowing for endogenous product offerings in the context of the $85 billion automotive industry bailout in 2009. Under alternate policies that facilitate an acquisition or liquidation of GM and Chrysler, product entry and exit moderate markup increases and output decreases by up to three-quarters.

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• Wolitzky, A. (2018). Learning from Others’ Outcomes. American Economic Review, 108, 2763–2801.

  I develop a simple model of social learning in which players observe others' outcomes but not their actions. A continuum of players arrives continuously over time, and each player chooses once-and-for-all between a safe action (which succeeds with known probability) and a risky action (which succeeds with fixed but unknown probability, depending on the state of the world). The actions also differ in their costs. Before choosing, a player observes the outcomes of K earlier players. There is always an equilibrium in which success is more likely in the good state, and this alignment property holds whenever the initial generation of players is not well-informed about the state. In the case of an outcome-improving innovation (where the risky action may yield a higher probability of success), players take the correct action as K → ∞. In the case of a cost-saving innovation (where the risky action involves saving a cost but accepting a lower probability of success), inefficiency persists as K → ∞ in any aligned equilibrium. Whether inefficiency takes the form of under-adoption or over-adoption also depends on the nature of the innovation. Convergence of the population to equilibrium may be non-monotone.

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• Williams, T. (2018). Capital Inflows, Sovereign Debt and Bank Lending: Micro-Evidence from an Emerging Market. Review of Financial Studies, 31, 4958–4994.

  This paper uses a natural experiment to show that government access to foreign credit increases private access to credit. I identify a sudden, and unanticipated increase in capital inflows to the sovereign debt market in Colombia, due to a rebalancing in a government bond index by J.P. Morgan. I find that market makers banks in the treasury market reduced their sovereign debt by 7.8 percentage points of assets and increased their credit availability by 4.2 percentage points of assets. Using industry level data, I show that a higher exposure to market makers led to a higher growth in economic activity.

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