It is commonly believed that deposit rates are determined primarily by supply: Depositors require higher deposit rates from risky banks, thereby creating market discipline. An alternative perspective is that market discipline is limited (e.g., due to deposit insurance and/or enhanced capital regulation) and that internal demand for funding by banks determines rates. Using branch-level deposit rate data, we find little evidence for market discipline as rates are similar across bank capitalization levels. In contrast, banks’ loan growth has a causal effect on deposit rates; for example, branches’ deposit rates are correlated with loan growth in other states in which their bank has some presence, suggesting internal capital markets help reallocate the bank’s funding.

We investigate whether saving Wall Street through TARP really saved Main Street during the recent financial crisis. Our difference-in-difference analysis suggests that TARP statistically and economically significantly increased net job creation and net hiring establishments and decreased business and personal bankruptcies. The results are robust, including accounting for endogeneity. The main mechanisms driving the results appear to be increases in commercial real estate lending and off-balance-sheet real estate guarantees. These results suggest that saving Wall Street via TARP may have helped save Main Street, complementing the TARP literature and contributing to the cost–benefit debate.

Motivated by a theoretical model, we examine for 43 countries whether it is policy or policy uncertainty that affects technological innovation more. Innovation activities, measured by patent-based proxies, are not, on average, affected by which policy is in place. Innovation activities, however, drop significantly during times of policy uncertainty measured by national elections. The drop is greater for more influential innovations (citations in the right tail, exploratory rather than exploitative innovations) and for innovation-intensive industries. We use close presidential elections and ethnic fractionalization to address endogeneity concerns. We uncover the mechanism underlying the main result by showing that the number of patenting inventors decreases with policy uncertainty. Political compromise, we conclude, encourages innovation.

We study data from an organization in which fund managers privately share and discuss detailed investment recommendations. Buy recommendations generate positive abnormal returns, and sell recommendations result in negative abnormal returns. In the context of these results, we explore an important economic question: Why do skilled investors share profitable ideas with others? Evidence suggests that the managers in our sample share to receive feedback on their ideas and to attract additional arbitrageur capital to the securities they recommend in order to correct mispricings.

We use high-frequency data to precisely estimate bond price reactions to macroeconomic announcements and the associated compensation for macro risks. We find evidence of a single factor summarizing the reaction of bond prices to different announcements. Before the financial crisis, the factor risk premium is substantial, significant, and mainly earned before announcement releases. After the crisis, the stock–bond covariance becomes negative and the preannouncement factor risk premium becomes insignificant. Our empirical results are consistent with information leakages that take place ahead of announcement releases and with the implications of a long-run risks model of bond risk premia.

Deregulation of the trucking industry and significantly lowered transportation costs led to large, widespread, and plausibly exogenous reductions in inventory for U.S. firms, with consequent increased supply-chain disruption (SCD) costs. We find evidence that increased SCD costs help explain the puzzling long-term trend of increasing average U.S. firm cash holdings. We also find that firms facing higher expected costs of disruptions generally save more cash from capital freed up via supply-chain management innovations. Finally, we document significant postdisruption declines in cash holdings consistent with cash as a primary source of financing during disruptions.

Despite the overwhelming trend in mutual funds toward team management, empirical studies find no performance benefits for this phenomenon. We show it is caused by large discrepancies in reported managerial structures in Center for Research in Security Prices and Morningstar Principia data sets versus U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, resulting in up to 50-basis-points underestimation of the team impact on fund returns. Using more accurate Morningstar Direct data, we find that team-managed funds outperform single-managed funds across various performance metrics. The relation between team size and fund performance is nonlinear. Also, team-managed funds take on no more risk than single-managed funds. Overall, team management benefits fund industry performance.

We examine the value consequences of corporate social responsibility through the lens of institutional shareholders. We find a sharp asymmetry between corporate policies that mitigate the firm’s exposure to environmental risk and those that enhance its perceived environmental friendliness (“greenness”). Institutional investors shun stocks with high environmental risk exposure, which we show have lower valuations, as predicted by risk management theory. These findings suggest that corporate environmental policies that mitigate environmental risk exposure create shareholder value. In contrast, firms that increase greenness do not create shareholder value and are also shunned by institutional investors.

We investigate the effect of information asymmetry on corporate tax avoidance. Using a difference-in-differences matching estimator to assess the effects of changes in analyst coverage caused by broker closures and mergers, we find that firms avoid tax more aggressively after a reduction in analyst coverage. We further find that this effect is mainly driven by firms with higher existing tax-planning capacity (e.g., tax-haven presence), smaller initial analyst coverage, and a smaller number of peer firms. Moreover, the effect is more pronounced in industries where reputation matters more and in firms subject to less monitoring from tax authorities.

This article analyzes the informative trading of professional money managers within a rational-expectations equilibrium model in which managers care about their performance relative to their peer group. I find that the existence of uninformed managers causes informed managers with relative performance concerns to trade less informatively, engendering less informative prices. When managers are differentially informed, they need to forecast the average performance based on private signals, and each manager may place more weight on the private signal if the signal provides good information about the average performance. The price aggregates those signals and thus becomes more informative.

Equity index volatility variation and its interaction with the index return can come from three distinct channels. First, index volatility increases with the market’s aggregate financial leverage. Second, positive shocks to systematic risk increase the cost of capital and reduce the valuation of future cash flows, generating a negative correlation between the index return and its volatility, regardless of financial leverage. Finally, large negative market disruptions show self-exciting behaviors. This article proposes a model that incorporates all three channels and examines their relative contribution to index option pricing and stock option pricing for different types of companies.

We test whether model misspecification or liquidity spirals primarily explain the observed excess dependence in filtered (for economic fundamentals) hedge fund index returns and the links between volatility, liquidity shocks, and hedge fund return clustering. Evidence supports the model misspecification hypothesis: i) hedge fund filtered return clustering is symmetric, ii) filtered Short Bias fund returns exhibit negative dependence with filtered returns for other hedge fund types, iii) negative liquidity shocks are associated with clustering in both tails and market volatility subsumes the role of negative liquidity shocks, and iv) these same patterns appear in size-sorted equity portfolios.

We present CoMargin, a new methodology to estimate collateral requirements in derivatives central counterparties (CCPs). CoMargin depends on both the tail risk of a given market participant and its interdependence with other participants. Our approach internalizes trading externalities and enhances the stability of CCPs, thus reducing systemic risk concerns. We assess our methodology using proprietary data from the Canadian Derivatives Clearing Corporation that include daily observations of the actual trading positions of all of its members from 2003 to 2011. We show that CoMargin outperforms existing margining systems by stabilizing the probability and minimizing the shortfall of simultaneous margin-exceeding losses.

This article empirically examines the interaction between entrepreneurial plaintiff firm litigation and venture capital (VC). The data indicate that, relative to nonplaintiffs, firms that litigate prior to (after) obtaining VC i) receive financing from less (more) reputable venture capitalists (VCs), ii) are subject to greater (similar) oversight by VCs, iii) receive less (more) VC funding, iv) are more likely to exit through an initial public offering than through an acquisition, and v) are less likely to be liquidated when litigation occurs after VC financing. The results are robust to different specifications, methodologies, and endogeneity checks.

Population-wide increase in life expectancy is a source of aggregate risk. Longevity-linked securities are a natural instrument to reallocate that risk. This paper extends the standard Campbell–Viceira (2005) strategic asset allocation model by including a longevity-linked investment possibility. Model estimation, based on prices for standardized annuities publicly offered by U.S. insurance companies, shows that aggregate shocks to survival probabilities are predictors for long-term returns of the longevity-linked securities, and reveals an unexpected predictability pattern. Valuation of longevity risk premium confirms that longevity-linked securities offer inexpensive funding opportunities to asset managers.

We investigate whether long-term and short-term components of typical conditioning variables in asset pricing studies, such as the dividend yield or yield spread, have different implications for optimal asset allocation. We argue that short-term components relate mostly to momentum, and long-term components relate mostly to mean-reversion effects, respectively. Therefore, they may have a different information content for investors with different horizons. We obtain improvements in terms of out-of-sample Sharpe ratios and expected utilities for decomposed state variables that directly reflect information related to the stock market, such as the dividend yield and stock market trend.

We consistently show that in large equity markets, the dividend–price ratio is significantly related to the growth of future dividends. To uncover this relation, we use monthly dividends and a mixed data sampling technique, which allows us to address within-year seasonality. Our approach avoids the use of overlapping observations and at the same time reduces the impact of price volatility on the dividend–price ratio. An empirical analysis using market-level data from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan strongly supports the dividend growth predictability hypothesis, suggesting that time aggregation of dividends eliminates significant information.