顶刊追踪！金融类TOP期刊目录（2024年9月英文 上期）

摘要

Financial institutions received investments under the Troubled Asset Relief Program in a bad state of the world but repaid them in a relatively good state. We show that the recipients paid considerably lower returns to taxpayers compared to private-market securities with similar risk over the same investment horizon, resulting in a subsidy of over $50 billion on the preferred equity investment by the government. Ex-post renegotiation of contract terms limited the upside gains received by taxpayers in good times and contributed to the subsidy. These findings have important implications for the design and implementation of future bailouts. Our simple methodology for calculating the subsidy can be applied to evaluate the financial costs of other bailouts.

摘要

Central bank balance sheet expansion, through actions like quantitative easing, is run through commercial banks. While this increases liquid central bank reserves held on commercial bank balance sheets, demandable uninsured deposits issued to finance the reserves also increase. Subsequent shrinkage in the central bank balance sheet may entail shrinkage in bank-held reserves without a commensurate reduction in deposit claims. Furthermore, during episodes of liquidity stress, when many claims on liquidity are called, surplus banks may hoard reserves. As a result, central bank balance sheet expansion may create less additional liquidity than typically thought, and indeed, may increase the probability and severity of episodes of liquidity stress.

摘要

We develop a model of bailout stigma in which accepting a bailout signals a firm's balance-sheet weakness and reduces its funding prospects. To avoid stigma, high-quality firms withdraw from subsequent financing after receiving bailouts or refuse bailouts altogether to send a favorable signal. The former leads to a short-lived stimulation followed by a market freeze even worse than if there were no bailout. The latter revives the funding market, albeit with delay, to the level achievable without any stigma and implements a constrained optimal outcome. A menu of multiple bailout programs compounds bailout stigma and exacerbates the market freeze.

摘要

Studying China's credit market using a structural default model that integrates credit risk, liquidity, and bailout, we document improved price discovery and a deepening divide between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs. Amidst liquidity deterioration, the presence of government bailout helps alleviate the heightened liquidity-driven default, making SOE bonds more valuable and widening the SOE premium. Meanwhile, the increased importance of government support makes SOEs more sensitive to bailout, while the heightened default risk increases non-SOEs' sensitivity to credit quality. Examining the real impact, we find severe performance deteriorations of non-SOEs relative to SOEs, reversing the long-standing trend of non-SOEs outperforming SOEs.

摘要

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984 to 2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of news attention allocated to each theme over time. News attention closely tracks a wide range of economic activities and can forecast aggregate stock market returns. A text-augmented vector autoregression demonstrates the large incremental role of news text in forecasting macroeconomic dynamics. We retrieve the narratives that underlie these improvements in market and business cycle forecasts.

摘要

All-cash homebuyers account for one-third of U.S. home purchases between 1980 and 2017. We use multiple data sets and research designs to robustly estimate that mortgaged buyers pay an 11% premium over all-cash buyers to compensate home sellers for mortgage transaction frictions. A dynamic, representative-seller model implies only a 3% premium, which would suggest an 8% puzzle. Accounting for heterogeneity in selling conditions explains half of this difference, but a puzzle holds in conditions with high transaction risk. An experimental survey of U.S. homeowners replicates these patterns and suggests that belief distortions can explain the puzzle in these high-risk states.

摘要

We investigate hedge fund firms’ unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk-adjusted return difference between a firm's reported gross return and its portfolio return inferred from its disclosed long-equity holdings. Firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 6.36% per annum on a risk-adjusted basis. UP is negatively associated with a firm's trading costs and positively associated with intraquarter trading in equity positions, derivatives usage, short selling, and confidential holdings. We show that limited investor attention can delay investors’ response to UP and lead to longer lived predictability of fund firm performance.

摘要

We arranged for trained undercover men and women to pose as potential clients and visit all 65 local financial advisory firms in Hong Kong. At financial planning firms, but not at securities firms, women were more likely than men to receive advice to buy only individual or only local securities. Female clients who signaled high confidence, high risk tolerance, or a domestic outlook were especially likely to receive this suboptimal advice. Our theoretical model explains these patterns as a result of statistical discrimination interacting with advisors’ incentives. Taste-based discrimination is unlikely to explain the results.

摘要

Based on automated credit lines to vendors trading on Alibaba's online retail platform and a discontinuity in the credit decision algorithm, we document that a vendor's access to FinTech credit boosts its sales growth, transaction growth, and the level of customer satisfaction gauged by product, service, and consignment ratings. These effects are more pronounced for vendors characterized by greater information asymmetry about their credit risk and less collateral, which reveals the information advantage of FinTech credit over traditional credit technology.

摘要

We show theoretically that a critical determinant of the attractiveness of venture capital (VC)-backed entrepreneurship for high-earning potential founders is the expected time to develop a startup's initial product. This is because founder-CEOs' cash compensation increases substantially after product development, alleviating the nondiversifiable risk that founders face at startup birth. Consistent with the model's predictions of where the supply of entrepreneurial talent is likely to be most constrained, we find that technological shocks differentially altering the expected time to product across industries can explain changes in both the rate of entry and characteristics of individuals selecting into VC-backed entrepreneurship.

摘要

Twelve trillion dollars are allocated to private market funds that require outside investors to commit to transferring capital on demand. We show within a novel dynamic portfolio allocation model that ex-ante commitment has large effects on investors' portfolios and welfare, and we quantify those effects. Investors are underallocated to private market funds and are willing to pay a larger premium to adjust the quantity committed than to eliminate other frictions, like timing uncertainty and limited tradability. Perhaps counterintuitively, commitment risk premiums increase with secondary market liquidity, and they do not disappear when investments are spread over many funds.

摘要

The disposition effect for a stock significantly weakens if the portfolio is at a gain, but is large when it is at a loss. We find this portfolio-driven disposition effect (PDDE) in four independent settings: U.S. and Chinese archival data, as well as U.S. and Chinese experiments. The PDDE is robust to a variety of controls in regression specifications and is not explained by extreme returns, portfolio rebalancing, tax considerations, or investor heterogeneity. Our evidence suggests that investors form mental frames at both the stock and the portfolio levels and that these frames combine to generate the PDDE.

摘要

 The prevalence of pay based on risky firm outcomes for nonexecutive workers presents a puzzling departure from conventional contract theory, which predicts insurance provision by the firm. When workers at the same firm compete against each other for promotions, the optimal contract features pay based on firm outcomes as insurance against promotion risk. The model's predictions are consistent with many observed phenomena, such as performance-based vesting and overvaluation of equity pay by nonexecutive workers. It also generates novel predictions linking a firm's hierarchy to its workers' pay structure.

摘要

We examine the timing of returns around the publication of anomaly trading signals. Using a database that captures when information is first publicly released, we show that anomaly returns are concentrated in the first month after information release dates, and these returns decay soon thereafter. We also show that the academic convention of forming portfolios in June underestimates predictability because it uses stale information, which makes some anomalies appear insignificant. In contrast, we show many anomalies do predict returns if portfolios are formed immediately after information releases. Finally, we develop guidance on forming portfolios without using stale information.

摘要

The stylized fact that volatility is not priced in individual equity options does not withstand scrutiny. First, we show that the average return of heavily traded deep out-of-the-money call options on stocks is −116 basis points per day. Second, Fama-MacBeth estimates of the volatility risk premium in stock options are similar to those in S&P 500 Index call options. Third, the mean return of heavily traded delta-hedged at-the-money calls (puts) is −23 (−30) basis points. Fourth, the variance risk premium in stock options is negative. Our analysis highlights the importance of microstructure biases and robustness in empirical work with options.

摘要

We analyze a setting in which a board must hire a chief executive officer (CEO) after exerting effort to learn about the quality of each candidate. Optimal effort is asymmetric, implying asymmetric likelihoods of each candidate being chosen. If the board has an infinitesimal bias in favor of one candidate, it allocates effort to maximize the likelihood of that candidate being chosen. Even when the board's prior is that its preferred candidate is inferior, she may still be chosen most often. A glass ceiling can also arise whereby the tendency to hire favored candidates increases as the importance of the position increases.

摘要

Using granular data on U.S. hotel investments over the past two decades, we show that industry-specialist PE firms achieve higher net income from operations and higher capital gains from sale than generalist PE firms for comparable properties. Those results are driven by specialists implementing more and larger cost savings without compromising revenues. Fundamentally, specialists utilize their hotel-specific operating expertise to produce superior performance outcomes. We show that specialists across investment sectors possess deeper industry-specific operating expertise. Our results suggest that specialist PE firms can compete with their generalist rivals by leveraging such expertise in a chosen market niche.

摘要

We propose a model of the financial system in which banks are individually prone to runs and connected through fire sales. Strategic complementarities within and across banks amplify each other, making heterogeneity in bank risks a key factor shaping the fragility of each bank and the entire system. As long as different banks are interconnected, an increase in heterogeneity stabilizes all banks. Reductions in asset commonality, bank-specific disclosures, and even broad-based policies such as asset purchases and liquidity requirements can enhance stability by increasing bank heterogeneity.

摘要

We examine the pricing of sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs), where the cash flows depend on the bond issuer achieving one or more Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. Investors are willing to accept a 1–2bps lower yield due to the bond’s ESG label, providing evidence of investors caring about environmental impact. Furthermore, we find the average probability of missing the target is 14%–39% so firms set ESG targets that are easy to reach. We find that the SLB market is efficient: the prices of SLBs depend strongly on the size of the potential penalty and there is no evidence of mispricing. Finally, our results suggest that SLBs serve as financial hedges against ESG risk.

摘要

RMBS sponsors contributed to the rise of new product features in securitized mortgages prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Using a regulatory shock to sponsor competition , we show securitization influences the design of mortgage contracts, empirically demonstrating a unique, feedback loop of product differentiation from the derived security (MBS) to the underlying asset (loans). Product differentiation in Prime MBS collateral rises faster than that of non-prime in the early boom period (2000–2004), a strategic choice by MBS sponsors in the face of increasing competition. At very high levels of competition, product differentiation targets non-prime (marginal) borrowers. We develop a theoretical framework for sponsor-induced product differentiation that explains these empirical findings.

摘要

This paper studies the rise of direct lending using a comprehensive dataset of investments by business development companies (BDC). We exploit three exogenous shocks to credit supply, including new banking regulations and a major finance company collapse, to establish that BDC capital acts as a substitute for traditional financing. Using firm-level data, we further document that firms’ access to BDC funding stimulates their employment growth and patenting activity. Beyond credit provision, BDCs contribute to firm growth through managerial assistance.

摘要

Investment-based asset pricing models typically predict a close link between a firm’s stock return and its characteristics at any point in time. Yet, previous studies have primarily focused on the weaker prediction that this link holds on average, finding substantial empirical support. We show how to incorporate the time-series predictions in the estimation and testing of investment-based models using the generalized method of moments. We find that standard specifications of investment-based models with one physical capital input fail to match the time series properties of stock returns in the data, and discuss the implications of the findings for future research.

摘要

We study the extent to which time-variation in market betas influence estimates of CAPM alphas. Given the observed variation in conditional market betas, market risk premia, and market variance, the required compensation for conditional market risk can, in theory, be as large as the unconditional equity premium. We implement the conditional CAPM using state-of-the-art methods in a broad global sample. We find that accounting for conditional risk helps explain the return on all the major anomalies we consider and that conditional risk explains two percentage points of alpha for value, investment, and momentum strategies in recent years.

摘要

Concerns about income inequality emphasize the importance of accurate income measures. Estimates of top income shares based only on individual tax returns are biased by tax-base changes, social changes, and missing income sources. This paper addresses these shortcomings and presents new estimates of the distribution of national income since 1960. Our analysis of pretax income shows that top income shares are lower and have increased less since 1980 than other studies using tax data. In addition, increasing government transfers and tax progressivity have resulted in rising real incomes for all income groups and little change in aftertax top income shares.

摘要

Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society’s choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of heterogeneous individuals. We define and characterize the Bayes welfare set, consisting of the population’s utility profiles that are feasible under some information policy. The Pareto frontier of this set can be recovered by a series of standard Bayesian persuasion problems. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which an information policy exists that Pareto dominates the no-information policy. We illustrate our results with applications to data leakage, price discrimination, and credit ratings.

摘要

Wealth inequality has prompted calls for higher taxes on capital income and wealth but also concerns that rich households would respond by concealing their assets offshore. We use a general equilibrium model to study how taxing capital more heavily would affect offshore tax evasion and how this would affect the broader economy. Without evasion, tax revenue could be increased dramatically, inequality could be reduced, and widespread welfare gains could be achieved. After accounting for evasion, however, tax revenue would rise marginally or even fall, inequality would increase, and widespread welfare losses would result.

摘要

We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.

摘要

Standard labor market models assume that workers hold accurate beliefs about the external wage distribution, and hence their outside options with other employers. We test this assumption by comparing German workers’ beliefs about outside options with objective benchmarks. First, we find that workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage: workers that would experience a 10% wage change if switching to their outside option only expect a 1% change. Second, workers in low-paying firms underestimate wages elsewhere. Third, in response to information about the wages of similar workers, respondents correct their beliefs about their outside options and change their job search and wage negotiation intentions. Finally, we analyze the consequences of anchoring in a simple equilibrium model. In the model, anchored beliefs keep overly pessimistic workers stuck in low-wage jobs, which gives rise to monopsony power and labor market segmentation.

摘要

The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This article studies its role in generating wage inequality, using novel data from an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs: Hired.com. To use the platform, job candidates must post an ask salary, stating how much they want to make in their next job. Firms then apply to candidates by offering them a bid salary, solely based on the candidate’s résumé and ask salary. If the candidate is hired, a final salary is recorded. After adjusting for résumé characteristics, the ask gap is 2.9%, the bid gap is 2.2%, and the final offer gap is 1.4%. Further controlling for the ask salary explains the entirety of the residual gender gaps in bid and final salaries. To further provide evidence of the causal effect of the ask salary on the bid salary, I exploit an unanticipated change in how candidates were prompted to provide their ask. For some candidates in mid-2018, the answer box used to solicit the ask salary was changed from an empty field to an entry prefilled with the median bid salary for similar candidates. I find that this change drove the ask, bid, and final offer gaps to zero. In addition, women did not receive fewer bids or final offers than men did due to the change, suggesting they faced little penalty for demanding comparable wages.

摘要

We develop empirical tools for studying discrimination in multiphase systems and apply them to the setting of foster care placement by child protective services. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of two sets of decision-makers—initial hotline call screeners and subsequent investigators—we study how unwarranted racial disparities arise and propagate through this system. Using a sample of over 200,000 maltreatment allegations, we find that calls involving Black children are 55% more likely to result in foster care placement than calls involving white children with the same potential for future maltreatment in the home. Call screeners account for up to 19% of this unwarranted disparity, with the remainder due to investigators. Unwarranted disparity is concentrated in cases with potential for future maltreatment, suggesting that white children may be harmed by “underplacement” in high-risk situations.

摘要

Decision makers, such as doctors, judges, and managers, make consequential choices based on predictions of unknown outcomes. Do these decision makers make systematic prediction mistakes based on the available information? If so, in what ways are their predictions systematically biased? In this article, I characterize conditions under which systematic prediction mistakes can be identified in empirical settings such as hiring, medical diagnosis, and pretrial release. I derive a statistical test for whether the decision maker makes systematic prediction mistakes under these assumptions and provide methods for estimating the ways the decision maker’s predictions are systematically biased. I analyze the pretrial release decisions of judges in New York City, estimating that at least 20% of judges make systematic prediction mistakes about misconduct risk given defendant characteristics. Motivated by this analysis, I estimate the effects of replacing judges with algorithmic decision rules and find that replacing judges with algorithms where systematic prediction mistakes occur dominates the status quo.

摘要

A new form of secured lending using “digital collateral” has recently emerged, most prominently in low- and middle-income countries. Digital collateral relies on lockout technology, which allows the lender to temporarily disable the flow value of the collateral to the borrower without physically repossessing it. We explore this new form of credit in a model and a field experiment using school-fee loans digitally secured with a solar home system. Securing a loan with digital collateral drastically reduced default rates (by 19 percentage points) and increased the lender’s rate of return (by 49 percentage points). Using a variant of the Karlan and Zinman (2009) methodology, we decompose the total effect on repayment and find that roughly two-thirds is attributable to moral hazard, and one-third to adverse selection. In addition, access to digitally secured school-fee loans significantly increased school enrollment and school-related expenditures without detrimental effects on households’ balance sheets.

摘要

In 2013, the Dutch government mandated that new conforming mortgages must fully amortize. Within a difference-in-differences design, we estimate that the marginal wealth accumulation from amortization is close to one, even five years later. Households purchasing after the reform primarily cut consumption and leisure over other savings, leading to a rise in wealth. This holds if we use life events to instrument for the timing of home purchase. Estimates are similar for seemingly unconstrained households and movers, suggesting a broad applicability of our results. Consistent with a simple model, we find lower estimates for households that appear less financially sophisticated or willing to adjust short-term consumption. Mortgage amortization schedules are among the largest savings plans in the world, and our results highlight their critical importance for household wealth building and macroprudential policies.

摘要

 In the 1960s, two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—targeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. For the next 15 years, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers changed little, leading many scholars to conclude that the legislation was ineffectual. This article revisits this conclusion using two research designs, which leverage (i) cross-state variation in preexisting state equal pay laws and (ii) variation in the 1960 gender gap across occupation-industry-state-group cells to capture differences in the legislation's incidence. Both designs suggest that federal antidiscrimination legislation led to striking gains in women's relative wages, which were concentrated among below-median wage earners. These wage gains offset preexisting labor market forces, which worked to depress women's relative pay growth, resulting in the apparent stability of the gender gap at the median and mean in the 1960s and 1970s. The data show little evidence of short-term changes in women's employment but suggest that firms reduced their hiring and promotion of women in the medium to long term. The historical record points to the key role of the Equal Pay Act in driving these changes.

摘要

 In the early 1900s, telephone operation was among the most common jobs for American women, and telephone operators were ubiquitous. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network. Using variation across U.S. cities in the timing of adoption, we study how this wave of automation affected the labor market for young women. Although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs, including new categories of work. Using a new genealogy-based census-linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most affected, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working.

摘要

 Frictions that impede the mobility of workers across occupations and space are a prominent feature of developing countries. We disentangle the role of insecure property rights from other labor-mobility frictions for the reallocation of labor from agriculture to nonagriculture and from rural to urban areas. We combine rich household and individual-level panel data from China and an equilibrium quantitative framework featuring sorting of workers across locations and occupations. We explicitly model the farming household and the endogenous decisions of who operates the family farm and who potentially migrates, capturing an additional channel of selection in the household. We find that land insecurity has substantial negative effects on agricultural productivity and structural change, raising the share of rural households operating farms by over 40 percentage points and depressing agricultural productivity by more than 20%. Comparatively, these quantitative effects are as large as those from all residual labor-mobility frictions. We measure a sharp reduction in overall labor-mobility barriers over 2004–2018 in the Chinese economy, all accounted for by improved land security, consistent with reforms covering rural land in China during the period.

摘要

 Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such “socially responsible consumers” in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational consequentialist consumers. In violation of price taking, equilibrium feedback nontrivially dampens the impact of a person’s consumption on aggregate consumption, undermining the motive to mitigate. This leads to a new type of market failure, where even consumers who fully “internalize the externality” overconsume externality-generating goods. At the same time, socially responsible consumers change the relative effectiveness of taxes, caps, and other policies in lowering the externality. Second, since consumer beliefs about and preferences over their market impacts play a crucial role in our framework, we investigate them empirically via a tailored survey. Consistent with our model, consumers are often consequentialist, and many believe that they have a dampened impact on aggregate consumption. Inconsistent with our model, however, we also find many respondents who expect to have a one-to-one impact on aggregate consumption. Third, therefore, we analyze how such “naive” consumers modify our theoretical conclusions. They consume less than rational consumers in a single-good economy, but may consume more in a multigood economy with cross-market spillovers. A mix of naive and rational consumers may yield the worst outcomes.