Using contract‐level data for the Canadian mortgage market, this paper provides evidence of an “invest‐and‐harvest” pricing pattern. We build a dynamic model of price negotiation with search and switching frictions to capture key market features. We estimate the model and use it to investigate the effects of market frictions and the resulting dynamic competition on borrowers' and banks' payoffs. We

We examine the effect of personal, two‐way communication on the payment behavior of delinquent borrowers. Borrowers who speak with a randomly assigned bank agent are significantly more likely to successfully resolve the delinquency relative to borrowers who do not speak with a bank agent. Call characteristics related to the human touch of the call, such as the likeability of the agent's voice, significantly

This paper investigates the role of private equity (PE) in failed‐bank resolutions after the 2008 financial crisis, using proprietary Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation failed‐bank acquisition data. PE investors made substantial investments in underperforming and riskier failed banks, particularly in geographies where local banks were also distressed, filling the gap created by a weak, undercapitalized

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This address reviews macrofinance from the perspective of resilience. It argues for a shift in mindset, away from risk management toward resilience management. It proposes a new resilience measure, and contrasts micro- and macro-resilience. It also classifies macrofinance models in first- (log-linearized) and second-generation models, and links the important themes of macrofinance to resilience.

We provide evidence using firm 10‐Ks that over the past 30 years, U.S. firms have expanded their scope of operations. Increases in scope were achieved largely without increasing traditional operating segments. Scope expansion significantly increases valuation and is realized primarily through acquisitions and investment in R&D, but not through capital expenditures. Traditional concentration ratios

We study theoretically how the proliferation of new data (“data abundance”) affects the allocation of capital between quantitative and nonquantitative asset managers (“data miners” and “experts”), their performance, and price informativeness. Data miners search for predictors of asset payoffs and select those with a sufficiently high precision. Data abundance raises the precision of the best predictors

Although algorithmic trading now dominates financial markets, some exchanges continue to use human floor traders. On March 23, 2020 the NYSE suspended floor trading because of COVID‐19. Using a difference‐in‐differences analysis around the closure of the floor, we find that floor traders are important contributors to market quality. The suspension of floor trading leads to higher spreads and larger

Moreira and Muir question the existence of a strong risk-return trade-off by showing that investors can improve performance by reducing exposure to risk factors when their volatility is high. However, Cederburg et al. show that these strategies fail out-of-sample, and Barroso and Detzel show they do not survive transaction costs. We propose a conditional multifactor portfolio that outperforms its unconditional

We use a large cross section of equity returns to estimate a rich affine model of equity prices, dividends, returns, and their dynamics. Our model prices dividend strips of the market and equity portfolios without using strips data in the estimation. Yet model-implied equity yields closely match yields on traded strips. Our model extends equity term-structure data over time (to the 1970s) and across

The pricing of carbon transition risk is central to the debate on climate‐aware investments. Emissions are tightly linked to sales and are available to investors only with significant lags. The positive carbon return, or brown‐minus‐green return differential, documented in previous studies arises from forward‐looking firm performance information contained in emissions rather than a risk premium in

We study the impact of rising mortgage rates on mobility and labor reallocation. Using individual-level credit record data and variation in the timing of mortgage origination, we show that a 1 percentage point decline in the difference between mortgage rates locked in at origination and current rates reduces moving by 9% overall and 16% between 2022 and 2024, and this relationship is asymmetric. Mortgage

We provide a simple model of investment by a firm funded with debt and equity and empirical evidence to demonstrate that, once we control for the debt overhang problem with credit spreads, asset volatility is an unambiguously positive signal for investment, while equity volatility sends a mixed signal: Elevated volatility raises the option value of equity and increases investment for financially sound

Using detailed account-level data, this paper explores how financial sophistication affects consumers' spending responses to changes in income. I document that, controlling for liquidity, financially unsophisticated consumers display significant spending responses to predictable decreases in their disposable income. Furthermore, they have lower savings rates, fewer liquid savings, and higher debt-to-income

I present a model of consumption and savings for a multiperson household in which members are imperfectly altruistic, derive utility from both private and shared public goods, and share wealth. I show that, despite having standard exponential time preferences, the household is time-inconsistent: Members save too little and overspend on private consumption goods. The household remains time-inconsistent

Liquidity transformation, a key role of banks, is thought to increase fragility, as uninsured depositors face an incentive to withdraw money before others (a so-called panic run). Despite much theoretical work, however, there is little empirical evidence establishing this mechanism. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale evidence of this mechanism. Banks that engage in more liquidity transformation

We show that utility tokens can limit the rent-seeking activities of two-sided platforms with market power while preserving efficiency gains due to network effects. We model platforms where buyers and sellers can meet to exchange services. Tokens serve as the sole medium of exchange on a platform and can be traded in a secondary market. Tokenizing a platform commits a firm to give up monopolistic rents

We propose a novel way to estimate a portfolio's abnormal price, the percentage gap between price and the present value of dividends computed with a chosen asset pricing model. Our method, based on a novel identity, resembles the time-series estimator of abnormal returns, avoids the issues in alternative approaches, and clarifies the role of risk and mispricing in long-horizon returns. We apply our

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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

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

We provide novel evidence that funding frictions can limit firms’ short-term investments in receivables and inventories, reducing their production capacity. We propose a credit multiplier driven by these considerations and empirically isolate its importance by comparing how a similar firm responds to shocks differently when these shocks are initiated in their most profitable quarter (“main quarter”)

We propose a model of post-Great Financial Crisis (GFC) money markets and monetary policy implementation. In our framework, capital regulation may deter banks from intermediating liquidity derived from holding reserves to shadow banks. Consequently, money markets can be segmented, and the scarcity of Treasury bills available to shadow banks is the main driver of short-term spreads. In this regime,

Investments in international fixed-income securities are exposed to significant currency risks. We collect novel data on currency derivatives used by U.S. international fixed-income funds. We document that while 90% of funds use currency forwards, they hedge, on average, only 18% of their currency exposure. Funds' currency forward positions differ substantially based on risk management demands related

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

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

We analyze a principal-agent model in which an effort-averse agent can manipulate a publicly observable performance report. The principal cannot observe the agent's cost of effort, her effort choice, and whether she manipulated the report. An optimal contract links compensation to the realized output and the (possibly manipulated) report. Manipulation can be beneficial to the principal because it can

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

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

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

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

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

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

We provide estimates of Treasury convenience premia across the entire term structure of Treasury bills, notes, and bonds over more than a quarter of a century and document a variety of key stylized facts about their time‐series and cross‐sectional patterns. These results raise concerns about the evolving nature of Treasury markets and suggest that investors may now place less weight on the traditional

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

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

We show that public banks face negative stock return jumps after missing their earnings per share (EPS) targets, and theoretically and quantitatively link these jumps to bunching behavior in the EPS surprise distribution. Bunching banks cut deposit rates to meet their targets, but do so at the expense of deposit outflows and franchise value losses. Local competitors, including private banks unexposed

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

We investigate the economic value of cash management. In the legal marijuana industry, where only half of businesses have access to cash management services from a financial institution, we examine dispensary profitability using administrative and survey data. Our results show that businesses with cash management charge higher retail prices (8.3%), pay lower wholesale prices (7.3%), and have higher

We experimentally study the transmission of subjective expectations into actions. Subjects in our experiment report valuations that are far too insensitive to their expectations, relative to the prediction from a frictionless model. We propose that the insensitivity is driven by a noisy cognitive process that prevents subjects from precisely computing asset valuations. The empirical link between subjective

A higher U.S. government debt-to-output (D-O) ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current D-O ratio. The market valuation of Treasurys is surprisingly insensitive to macro fundamentals. Instead, the future D-O ratio accounts for most of the variation because the D-O ratio

We study noisy aggregation of dispersed information in financial markets without imposing parametric restrictions on preferences, information, and return distributions. We provide a general characterization of asset returns by means of a risk-neutral probability measure that features excess weight on tail risks. Moreover, we link excess weight on tail risks to observable moments such as forecast dispersion

We study an economy with financial frictions in which a regulator designs a test that reveals outside information about a firm's quality to investors. The firm can also disclose verifiable inside information about its quality. We show that the regulator optimally aims for “public speech and private silence,” which is achieved with tests that give insiders an incentive to stay quiet. We fully characterize

We analyze the role of retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) and reserves when banks exert deposit market power and liquidity transformation entails externalities. Optimal monetary architecture minimizes the social costs of liquidity provision, and optimal monetary policy follows modified Friedman rules. Interest rates on reserves and CBDC should differ. Calibrations robustly suggest that CBDC

We introduce a new measure of the price charged by financial intermediaries for connecting mortgage borrowers with capital market investors. Based on administrative lender pricing data, we document that the price of intermediation reacts strongly to variation in demand, reflecting capacity constraints of mortgage originators. This positive comovement of price with quantity reduced the pass-through

We placed 85,000 retail trades in six retail brokerage accounts from December 2021 to June 2022 to validate the Boehmer et al. algorithm, which uses subpenny trade prices to identify and sign retail trades. The algorithm identifies 35% of our trades as retail, incorrectly signs 28% of identified trades, and yields uninformative order imbalance measures for 30% of stocks. We modify the algorithm by

Using high-frequency spending data, we show that household consumption displays excess sensitivity to salient macroeconomic news, even when the news is not real. When the announced local unemployment rate reaches a 12-month maximum, local news coverage of unemployment increases and local consumers reduce their discretionary spending by 1.5% relative to consumers in areas with the same macroeconomic

The claim by Liu and Matthies (LM) that their macro news risk factor (NI) prices 51 portfolios (associated with four different portfolio groups) is not appropriate. In fact, their single-factor model is successful only in explaining the momentum deciles, while producing strongly negative performance for the remaining groups. The pricing performance is more doubtful in the case of the alternative news

We show that past inflation experiences strongly predict homeownership within and across countries. First, we collect novel survey data, which reveal inflation protection to be a key motivation for homeownership, especially after high inflation experiences. Second, using household data from 22 European countries, we find that higher exposure to historical inflation predicts higher homeownership rates

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market participation, driven primarily by increased fund ownership. Existing investors tilt their portfolios toward funds

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty—nonstandard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices when aggregate demand has inertia. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (above their steady-state levels consistent with current potential output). Overshooting leads to a temporary disconnect between the performance of financial markets and the real economy, but accelerates

We show that “zombie credit”—subsidized credit to nonviable firms—has a disinflationary effect. By keeping these firms afloat, zombie credit creates excess aggregate supply, thereby putting downward pressure on prices. Granular European data on inflation, firms, and banks confirm this mechanism. Markets affected by a rise in zombie credit experience lower firm entry and exit, capacity utilization,