Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth, and financial stability. Yet our understanding of the determinants of financial decision making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both standard and two-sample instrumental variable strategies, we show that education increases financial market participation, measured…
We develop a dynamic valuation model of private equity (PE) investments by solving the portfolio-choice problem for a risk-averse investor (LP), who invests in a PE fund, managed by a general partner (GP). Key features are illiquidity, leverage, GP value-adding skills (alpha), and compensation, including management fees and carried interest. We find that the costs of management fees, carried in…
We examine whether constraints on public firms affect firms' efficiency by testing if going private improves plant-level productivity relative to peer control groups. We find that, despite increases in productivity after going private, there is little evidence of efficiency gains relative to peer groups of plants constructed to control for industry, age, size, past productivity, and the endogen…
We examine a production-based asset pricing model with an unobservable mean growth rate ollowing a two-state Markov chain and with an ambiguity averse representative agent. Our model requires a low coefficient of relative risk aversion to produce: (i) a high equity premium and volatile equity returns, (ii) a low and smooth risk-free rate, (iii) smooth consumption growth and volatile nvestment g…
A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation, and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private signals in a cost-effective incentive-compatible way. It contributes to economic growth by raising total …
Collateral frictions have a profound effect on our economic landscape, ranging from the design of financial securities, laws, and institutions, to various rules and regulations. We analyze a model with disagreement, where securities and collateral requirements are endogenous. It shows that the security that isolates the variable with disagreement is "optimal" in the sense that alternative secur…
Credit default swaps (CDS) are derivative contracts that are widely used as tools for credit risk management. However, in recent years, concerns have been raised about whether CDS trading itself affects the credit risk of the reference entities. We use a unique, comprehensive sample covering CDS trading of 901 North American corporate issuers, between June 1997 and April 2009, to address this q…
Conventional wisdom suggests that high-reputation banks will generally produce good securities to maintain their long-run reputation. We show with a simple model that when securities are complex a high-reputation bank may produce assets that underperform during market downturns. We examine this possibility using a unique sample of 10.1 trillion dollars of CLO, MBS, ABS, and CDOs. Contrary to th…
We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross-section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk among individual stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures extracted from S&P 500 index options and negatively predicts real economic activity. We show that…
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Does borrowing at 400% APR do more harm than good? The U.S. Department of Defense thinks so and successfully lobbied for a 36% APR cap on loans to servicemen. But existing evidence on how access to high-interest debt affects borrowers is inconclusive. We estimate effects of payday loan access on enlisted personnel using exogenous variation in Air Force rules assigning personnel to bases across …
This paper quantitatively analyzes referee recommendations at eight prominent economics and finance journals, and the SFS (Society for Financial Studies) Cavalcade Conference, where a known algorithm matched referees to submissions. The behavior of referees was similar in all venues. The referee-specific component in the disposition recommendation was about twice as important as the common comp…
This paper considers the optimal joint decision on firm organization and capital structure under a tax-bankruptcy trade-off, stressing the role of guarantees against default. Conditional guarantees, which are embedded in parent-subsidiary structures, increase joint value and joint debt relative to unguaranteed stand-alone firms. Such guarantees, that are unilateral rather than mutual for modera…
This paper examines the impact of real estate prices on firm capital structure decisions. For a typical U.S. listed company, a one-standard-deviation increase in predicted value of firm pledgeable collateral translates into a 3 percentage points increase in firm leverage ratio. The identification strategy employs a triple interaction of MSA-level land supply elasticity, real estate prices, and …
We exploit a 2004 credit reform in Brazil that simplified the sale of repossessed cars used as collateral for auto loans. We show that the change has led to larger loans with lower spreads and longer maturities. The reform expanded credit to riskier, low-income borrowers for newer, more expensive cars. Although the credit reform improved riskier borrowers' access to credit, it also led to incre…
We study the impact of nationalism and interstate frictions on international economic relations by analyzing market reaction to adverse shocks to Sino-Japanese relations in 2005 and 2010. Japanese companies with high China exposure suffer relative declines during each event window; a symmetric effect is observed for Chinese companies with high Japanese exposure. The effect on Japanese companies…
Twentieth century Japan provides a remarkable laboratory for examining how an externally imposed institutional and regulatory intervention affects the ownership of corporations. In the first half of the century, Japan had weak legal protection but strong institutional arrangements. The institutions were dismantled after the war and replaced by a strong form of legal protection. This inversion r…
We propose a labor market model in which agents with heterogenous ability levels choose to work as bankers or as financial regulators. When workers extract intrinsic benefits from working in regulation (such as public-sector motivation or human capital accumulation), our model jointly predicts that bankers are, on average, more skilled than regulators and their compensation is more sensitive to…
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