Yes. We show that aggregate stock returns predict aggregate U.S. employment, despite the industrial composition of publicly traded firms differing markedly from that of all firms, and the representativeness of public firms declining over time. We also show that appropriately reweighted stock returns predict industry and local labor market outcomes. We find the strongest evidence of an alignment of interests between shareholders and workers in the manufacturing sector, despite its declining labor share of output. Our findings suggest that at quarterly frequencies, product demand shocks are more important drivers of industry- and city-level stock returns than technology shocks.

We identify Industry-Neutral Self-Financed Informed Trading (INSFIT) as stock trades financed by offsetting, equivalent dollar-denominated stock trades in the same industry. Approximately 37% of short-term mutual fund trading profits can be attributed to these trade pairs. Consistent with informed trading, INSFIT precedes unusually high media coverage for the underlying stocks. The trades underlying INSFIT are also larger as the release of stock-level news becomes more imminent. Both relative valuation and the hedging of industry exposure motivate INSFIT’s industry neutrality. While INSFIT positively impacts fund performance, active fund managers who execute INSFIT more aggressively obtain smaller trading profits per execution.

This article proposes a new method for examining the impact on a firm’s investment of uncertainty reflected in its stock-return volatility. We simultaneously address the endogeneity of uncertainty and mismeasurement in Tobin’s Q, but earlier empirical work often neglects one of the two issues. Our nonparametric estimates further suggest that the relation between investment and uncertainty is significantly decreasing and strongly concave. This result contrasts with the existing literature that widely adopts linear regressions. Ignoring nonlinearity or measurement error in Q can lead to a substantial estimation bias. However, the bias due to the endogeneity of uncertainty is small.

This article investigates the impact of exchange-traded fund (ETF) ownership on seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We find that increases to firms’ ETF ownership is positively related to their propensity to conduct an SEO. ETF ownership is also associated with less negative SEO announcement returns, smaller discounts, and better long-run stock returns. Our evidence is consistent with equity issuance following investor demand for stocks driven by greater participation in ETFs, suggesting a possible alternative source of market timing opportunity.

We study how banks use “regulatory adjustments” to inflate their regulatory capital ratios and whether this depends on forbearance on the part of national authorities. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels of regulatory capital via a reduction in regulatory adjustments (without a commensurate increase in book equity and without a reduction in bank risk). We document substantial heterogeneity in regulatory capital inflation across countries, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations.

Exploiting demand shocks from changes in federal government spending, we examine how the organizational structure of a firm affects its investment behavior. Government spending shocks affect the investment of government-dependent conglomerate segments less than matched stand-alone firms. Investment also increases in lower government-dependent segments when other segments within the same firm experience positive demand shocks, indicating cross-subsidization between segments. We further show that this cross-subsidization leads to worse operating performance and increases the diversification discount. Our findings are robust after addressing the endogeneity of government spending.

This article studies how industry peers’ stock prices respond when another firm in the industry is acquired by a foreign firm. The average stock price reactions of industry peers in horizontal foreign acquisitions around deal announcements are significantly negative. Peers’ returns are more negative in growing, less specialized, and competitive industries. Moreover, the negative stock price reactions of industry peers are related to future decreases in their operating performance. Overall, these results suggest that foreign acquisitions have strong competitive effects for the industry peers of U.S. target companies.

Combining experimental data sets from seven individual studies, including 255 asset markets with 2,031 participants, and 36,326 short-term price forecasts, we analyze the role of heterogeneity of beliefs in the organization of trading behavior by reproducing and reconsidering earlier experimental findings. Our results confirm prior evidence that price expectations affect trading behavior. However, heterogeneity in beliefs does not seem to drive overpricing and asset market bubbles, as suggested by earlier studies, and we find no indication of short-term beliefs being better determinants of trading behavior than longer-term beliefs.

Recent Delaware Chancery Court decisions that boards are self-interested in setting director compensation have focused scrutiny on the pay-setting process used by corporations. We examine the effect of peer benchmarking on director compensation decisions. Director pay relates positively to peer director pay, and firms paying their directors highly are selected as peers. Moreover, firm performance and board advising performance are positively related to the talent component and are generally unrelated to the self-serving component of the peer pay effect. The evidence indicates that firms use peer benchmarking to justify high compensation mainly to attract talented directors to enhance board quality.

We confirm prior evidence that bonds on average are offered at prices below their immediate post-offer secondary market prices. However, in cases where banks lead–manage their own bond offerings the underpricing is significantly less as compared with other non-self-marketed offerings. These findings are robust across various matched samples and selection models. Our results suggest that the bond offering process is characterized by substantive agency conflicts between shareholders of corporations (issuers) and underwriters.

We argue that syndicates associate venture capitalists (VCs) with uneven skill levels in order to lower their expected gains from threatening to stop financing: Non-continued participation would send a milder negative signal to alternative financiers. This can explain the empirical observations that i) early-round syndicates regularly associate VCs with different levels of experience and ii) follow-on syndicates often involve none of the early-round VCs. Consistent with the theory, we find empirically that the heterogeneity of VC experience levels in a syndicate is i) negatively related to the extent to which the founders of the VC-backed firm are professionally well connected and ii) positively related to the likelihood of syndicate switching in a later round.

We exploit the information content of option prices to construct a novel measure of bank tail risk. We document a persistent increase in tail risk for the U.S. banking industry following the global financial crisis, except for banks designated as systemically important by the Dodd–Frank Act. We show that this post-crisis difference in tail risk for large and small banks is consistent with the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) status of large banks being reinforced by the Dodd–Frank designation: Naming the banks whose failure could threaten the financial stability of the U.S. gave investors a list of banks the government deemed as TBTF.

Analyzing 48 foreign exchange (FX) rates and 1.2 million FX-related news articles over a 35-year period, using digital textual analysis, we find that a currency reversal investment strategy that buys (sells) currencies with low (high) media sentiment offers strong positive and statistically significant returns and Sharpe ratios. The results are robust and the strategy adds value over other currency premia determinants. Analysts’ forecasts systematically mispredict the reversal strategy. This is the first article to show that price reversals based on media sentiment are a well-defined feature of the FX market.

The opening of equity markets to foreign investment by developing countries appears to generate an enormously large positive growth effect (see Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad (2005), Journal of Financial Economics 77, 3–55) in spite of a relatively small role of such markets for financing investment in most economies. We propose a spillover channel from equity market opening to lower costs of bank loans, which helps to explain this puzzle. From analyzing bank loan data associated with China’s introduction of the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors program, we find significant support for this channel. Furthermore, we show that a reduction in the risk premium in loans is an important mechanism.

This article examines the severity of the 2008 arbitrage crash in the convertible bond market by estimating how expensive it would have been to liquidate portfolio securities immediately. We consider whether funds actually demanded immediate liquidity or were able to delay trades. Our results indicate that the cost of immediacy was high, but that convertible bond sellers could largely avoid selling at fire sale prices. These results can be explained by dealers recognizing when trades are liquidity-motivated rather than information-based and by a shift to riskless principal trading, allowing dealers to avoid taking bonds into inventory.

Pricing is integral to insurance design, directly influencing firm behavior and moral hazard, though its effects are insufficiently understood. I study a quasi-experiment in which deposit insurance premiums were changed for U.S. banks with unequal timing, generating differentials between banks in both levels and risk-based “steepness” of premiums. I find evidence that differentials in premiums resulted in distortions, including regulatory arbitrage, but also provided strong incentives to curb moral hazard. I find that firms that faced stronger pricing incentives to become (or remain) safer were more likely to subsequently do so than similar firms that faced weaker pricing incentives.

We study the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the bond market. Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. corporate bonds, we document that the presence of CDSs significantly increases bond liquidity and reduces yield spreads for investment grade bonds. We show that CDSs influence the bond market by lowering the impact of fire sales of institutional bondholders and facilitating inventory management for bond dealers who absorb fire sale shocks. However, the liquidity provision role of CDSs gets weakened after the CDS Big Bang in 2009, potentially because of the requirement of large upfront payments.

Using an international sample of IPO firms and two country-level measures of financial literacy, we find strong evidence that financial literacy is negatively associated with IPO underpricing. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of financial literacy in reducing IPO underpricing is more pronounced when the information environment is less transparent. Employing path analysis, we document that information friction, firm transparency, and stock market participation are mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that citizens’ financial literacy has an important and consistent influence on IPO underpricing.