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We exploit a mortgage reform that differentially unlocked home equity across the Danish population and study how this impacted selection into entrepreneurship. We find that increased entry was concentrated among entrepreneurs whose firms were founded in industries where they had no prior work experience. Nevertheless, we find that marginal entrants benefiting from the reform had higher pre-entry earnings and a significant share of these entrants started longer-lasting firms. Our results are most consistent with a view that housing collateral enabled higher ability individuals with less-well-established track records to overcome credit rationing and start new firms, rather than only leading to ‘frivolous entry’ by those without prior industry experience.

We study whether carbon emissions affect the cross-section of US stock returns. We find that stocks of firms with higher total carbon dioxide emissions (and changes in emissions) earn higher returns, controlling for size, book-to-market, and other return predictors. We cannot explain this carbon premium through differences in unexpected profitability or other known risk factors. We also find that institutional investors implement exclusionary screening based on direct emission intensity (the ratio of total emissions to sales) in a few salient industries. Overall, our results are consistent with an interpretation that investors are already demanding compensation for their exposure to carbon emission risk.

We find dealer-level evidence that recent regulation on the leverage ratio requirement causes deviations from covered interest parity. Our analysis uses a unique data set of currency derivatives with disclosed counterparty identities together with exogenous variation introduced by the U.K. leverage ratio framework. Dealers who are affected by the regulatory shock charge an additional premium of about 20 basis points per annum for synthetic dollar funding relative to unaffected dealers. This finding holds even after controlling for changes in clients' demand. Also, some clients increase their trading activity with unaffected dealers with whom they already had a preexisting relationship.

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen’s stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the German laws against this kind of abuse were not effectively enforced. Using hand-collected data we provide the first rigorous academic study of the Porsche-VW squeeze and show that it significantly impeded market efficiency. Preventing manipulation is important because without efficient securities markets, the EU’s major project of the Capital Markets Union cannot be successful.

Leverage initiating stocks experience an increase in return comovement with leveraged stocks and a decrease in return comovement with zero leverage stocks in the year after the leverage initiation event Conversely stocks that fully deleverage comove more with their new peers of zero leverage stocks and less with their old peers of leveraged stocks These findings are robust after controlling for common factors and firm characteristics and using various time series and events as exogenous shocks to corporate leverage decisions Our findings can be explained by investor clienteles for financial leverage and are not driven by omitted variables and other characteristic induced comovements 2021 Elsevier B V

The information obfuscation hypothesis states that managers use corporate green practices intentionally to obfuscate or disguise negative information and environmental misbehaviour to extract rents for personal career concerns. In contrast, signalling theory suggests that green-oriented firms deliver a positive signal to the market, favouring “green” investors. Such pro-environmental signals ultimately translate into enhanced financial performance and reduced risk of a price crash. Using Chinese listed firms as the research setting, we further investigate the relationship between corporate green commitment and stock price crash risk. The results show that solid green commitment significantly reduces stock price crash risk. The effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned firms and when the stock market is in a downturn. We also find mediating effects of external governance by institutional investors and media that transmit the impact of green commitment onto price crash risk. Our findings have important implications for corporate resilience against unexpected crises.

We find that when a U S domestic firm becomes a multinational MNC its returns comove more with those of existing multinational firms and less with those of purely domestic firms in the following year This result is robust to a propensity score matching method and an exogenous shock Turnover comovement and changes in mutual funds holdings of these MNC initiators further indicate that investors prefer multinationals as a style investment Moreover MNC initiators with larger foreign sales experience larger shifts in return comovement Finally the effect of MNC initiation on return comovement is relatively weaker for 2000 2016 than for 1979 1997 2022 Elsevier Inc

The promise of contingent convertible capital securities (CoCos) as a ”bail-in” solution has been the subject of considerable theoretical analysis and debate, but little is known about their effects in practice. We undertake the first comprehensive empirical analysis of bank CoCo issues, a market segment that comprises over 730 instruments totaling $521 billion. Four main findings emerge: (1) the propensity to issue a CoCo is higher for larger and better capitalized banks; (2) CoCo issues result in a statistically significant decline in issuers’ CDS spread, indicating that they generate risk-reduction benefits and lower costs of debt (this is especially true for CoCos that convert into equity, have mechanical triggers, and are classified as Additional Tier 1 instruments); (3) CoCos with only discretionary triggers do not have a significant impact on CDS spreads; and (4) CoCo issues have no statistically significant impact on stock prices, except for principal write-down CoCos with a high trigger level, which have a positive effect.

We study the problem of demand response contracts in electricity markets by quantifying the impact of considering a mean-field of consumers, whose consumption is impacted by a common noise. We formulate the problem as a Principal-Agent problem with moral hazard in which the Principal - she - is an electricity producer who observes continuously the consumption of a continuum of risk-averse consumers, and designs contracts in order to reduce her production costs. More precisely, the producer incentivises the consumers to reduce the average and the volatility of their consumption in different usages, without observing the efforts they make. We prove that the producer can benefit from considering the mean-field of consumers by indexing contracts on the consumption of one Agent and aggregate consumption statistics from the distribution of the entire population of consumers. In the case of linear energy valuation, we provide closed-form expression for this new type of optimal contracts that maximises the utility of the producer. In most cases, we show that this new type of contracts allows the Principal to choose the risks she wants to bear, and to reduce the problem at hand to an uncorrelated one., Comment: 54 pages, 7 figures

We outline a simple and robust methodology to align portfolios with a science-based, carbon budget consistent with maintaining a temperature rise below 1.5 °C with 83% probability. We show how to keep the tracking error at a negligible level. This approach works for both passive and active managers. It also establishes an exit roadmap for carbon-intensive corporates, thereby generating a form of competition to decarbonize within each sector. We also discuss four sources of risks: uncertainty around a rapidly shrinking carbon budget, time impacts on decarbonization rates, implementation risk due to market-wide selling pressure, and uncertainty about taxes on polluting companies.

Supplemental material file: online appendix We show that negative interest rate policy (NIRP) has expansionary effects on credit supply through a portfolio rebalancing channel. By shifting down and flattening the yield curve, NIRP differs from rate cuts just above the zero-lower-bound and has effects similar to QE. For identification, we exploit ECB’s NIRP and the Italian credit register and, for external validity, European and U.S. datasets. NIRP affects more banks with higher ex-ante liquid assets, including net interbank positions. More exposed banks reduce liquid assets, expand credit supply, especially to financially-constrained firms, and cut loan rates, inducing firms to increase investment and the wage bill. This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the ECO2015-68182-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) grant and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563).

We analyze the distributional effects of monetary policy on income, wealth and consumption. We use administrative household-level data covering the entire population in Denmark over the period 1987-2014 and exploit a long-standing currency peg as a source of exogenous variation in monetary policy. We consistently find that gains from softer monetary policy in terms of income, wealth and consumption are monotonically increasing in the ex-ante income level. The distributional effects reflect systematic differences in exposure to the various channels of monetary policy, especially non-labor channels (e.g. leverage and risky assets). Our estimates imply that softer monetary policy increases income inequality.

We present a new Hawkes-Contact model that combines a Hawkes process and a finite range contact process in order to model the stock price movements, especially under the impact of news and other information flows that could lead to contagious effects. To fully capture the underlying price process, we take the Hawkes process to track the full pathway of historical prices on their future movements and the contact process to capture the impact from news/investment sentiment. We compare this full model to a univariate Hawkes process that works as a benchmark model through analyzing their statistical properties using both simulated returns and the real five-minute returns of the crude oil index (Wind CZCE- TA). The statistical properties include probability density function (PDF), complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), Lempel-Ziv Complex (LZC). Our results show that the real returns’ distribution is often far from normal but the simulated returns through the Hawkes or Hawke-Contact model can achieve close fit to the real returns and exhibit similar statistical properties. More importantly, the Hawkes-Contact model performs better than the simple Hawkes model in capturing characteristics in the return movements, which indicates that the price evolution is also driven by the news announcements and sentiment created after them.

We find direct evidence that sovereign default risk has a negative impact on corporate performance via a rating spillover channel. Difference-in-differences tests exploiting the heterogeneity in corporate credit ratings following sovereign rating downgrades reveal that firm performance deteriorates predominantly for sovereign bound firms with higher information asymmetry, limited financial flexibility, and those operating in countries with less developed banking systems and lower investor protection.

Supplemental material files: supporting information: online appendix; replication file Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germany's 1931 banking crisis, collecting new data on bank branches and firm-bank connections. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in precrisis exposure to the bank at the center of the crisis, we show that Nazi votes surged in locations more affected by its failure. Radicalization in response to the shock was exacerbated in cities with a history of anti-Semitism. After the Nazis seized power, both pogroms and deportations were more frequent in places affected by the banking crisis. Our results suggest an important synergy between financial distress and cultural predispositions, with far-reaching consequences. This project has received funding from the ERC (648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the ECO2015-68182-P (MINECO/FEDER, EUE) grant and the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (SEV-2015-0563).

We study the impact ofQuickpay, a federal reform that indefinitely acceleratedpayments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong di-rect effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm-level. Importantly, how-ever, we also document substantial crowding out of non-treated firms’ employmentwithin local labor markets. While the overall net employment effect was positive,it was close to zero in tight labor markets – where crowding out was stronger. Ourresults highlight an important channel for alleviating financing constraints in smallfirms, but also emphasize the general-equilibrium effects of large-scale interventions,which can lead to lower aggregate outcomes depending on labor market conditions.

We explore how large and small banks make funding decisions when system-wide bailouts are possible. We show that bank size, purely on strategic grounds, is a key determinant of banks’ leverage choices, even when bailout policies treat large and small banks symmetrically. Large banks leverage more than small banks because they internalize that their decisions directly affect bailout policies. In equilibrium, this effect is amplified by strategic spillovers to small banks since banks’ leverage choices are strategic complements. Overall, the presence of large banks makes bailouts more likely. The optimal regulation features size-dependent policies that disproportionately restrict large banks’ leverage.

Recent reforms have given regulators broad powers to “bail-in” bank creditors during financial crises. We analyze efficient bail-ins and their implementation. To preserve liquidity, regulators must avoid signaling negative private information to creditors. Therefore, optimal bail-ins in bad times only depend on public information. As a result, the optimal policy cannot be implemented if regulators have wide discretion, due to an informational time-inconsistency problem. Rules mandating tough bail-ins after bad public signals, or contingent convertible (co-co) bonds, improve welfare. We further show that bail-in and bailout policies are complementary: if bailouts are possible, then discretionary bail-ins are more effective.

Heterogeneity in the taxation of asset returns can create ownership clienteles. Using a simple model, we demonstrate that an important consequence of tax-induced ownership segmentation is to limit risk-sharing, creating regions of the aggregate demand curve for the asset that are "downward-sloping.'' As a result, the constraints of the ownership clientele impact the asset price response to variations in asset supply, and make the asset's price more sensitive to movements in idiosyncratic risk. We test these predictions on U.S. municipal bonds, where cross-state variation in state tax privilege results in different levels of in-state ownership. In states with high tax-induced ownership segmentation, we find greater susceptibility of municipal bond yields to supply variation and heightened sensitivity of muni yields to local political uncertainty.

Default risk significantly affects the corporate policies of a firm. We develop a model in which a limited liability entity subject to default at an exponential random time jointly sets its dividend policy and capital structure to maximize the expected lifetime utility from consumption of risk‐averse equity investors. We give a complete characterization of the solution to the singular stochastic control problem. The optimal policy involves paying dividends to keep the ratio of firm's equity value to investors' wealth below a critical threshold. Dividend payout acts as a precautionary channel to transfer wealth from the firm to investors for mitigation of losses in the event of default. Higher the default risk, more aggressively the firm leverages and pays dividends.

What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis, we analyze and measure the effect of local weather-driven cash flow shocks on the real and financial sectors. We show that such cash flow shocks significantly affect a host of economic outcomes, including land values, loan delinquency rates, the probability of bank failure, employment, and wages. Estimates of the effect of local cash flow shocks on county income levels during the financial crisis yield a multiplier of 1.63.

We provide a unifying treatment of pathwise moderate deviations for models commonly used in financial applications, and for related integrated functionals. Suitable scaling enables us to transfer these results into small‐time, large‐time, and tail asymptotics for diffusions, as well as for option prices and realized variances. In passing, we highlight some intuitive relationships between moderate deviations rate functions and their large deviations counterparts; these turn out to be useful for numerical purposes, as large deviations rate functions are often difficult to compute.

The problem of optimal investment under a multivariate utility function allows for an investor to obtain utility not only from wealth, but other (possibly correlated) attributes. In this paper we implement multivariate mixtures of exponential (mixex) utility to address this problem. These utility functions allow for stochastic risk aversions to differing states of the world. We derive some new results for certainty equivalence in this context. By specifying different distributions for stochastic risk aversions, we are able to derive many known, plus several new utility functions, including models of conditional certainty equivalence and multivariate generalisations of HARA utility, which we call dependent HARA utility. Focusing on the case of asset returns and attributes being multivariate normal, we optimise the asset portfolio, and find that the optimal portfolio consists of the Markowitz portfolio and hedging portfolios. We provide an empirical illustration for an investor with a mixex utility function of wealth and sentiment.

© 2019 Financial Management Association International We investigate the role of financial analysts as corporate watchdogs. We show that firms that are subject to intense analyst monitoring are more likely to be investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission or to be the subject of a securities class action. Using cross-sectional variations in managerial entrenchment, we find that this effect is not a reflection of the “dark side of analyst coverage,” analysts pushing executives to misbehave to exceed short-term expectations. Our findings are robust to different identification strategies addressing the endogeneity of analyst coverage decisions.

In this paper we carry out a cross-country analysis of the correlation risk premium. We examine the statistical properties of the implied and realized correlation in European equity markets and relate the resulting premium to US equity market correlation risk and a global correlation risk premium. We find evidence of strong co-movement of correlation risk premiums in European and US equity markets. Our results support the existence of a strong empirical relationship between the global correlation risk premium and international equity market option returns. We document the dependence of the correlation risk premium on macroeconomic uncertainty and related variables.

We introduce this special issue on Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) with a focus on how EPU affects allocative efficiency. We observe that EPU affects the market value of firms in about 37% of Fama–French 30 industries, but leads to lower investments in 90% of them. Allocation decisions in a market economy rely on signals from the capital market, which EPU distorts. This may cause increasing conflicts of interest between managers and investors. We highlight key studies in the EPU literature and then describe each paper in this special issue. We also provide suggestions for future research. Accepted version

This paper uncovers a novel component for exchange rate predictability based on the price difference between sovereign credit default swaps denominated in different currencies. This new forecasting variable – the credit-implied risk premium – captures the expected currency depreciation conditional on a severe but rare credit event. Using data for 16 Eurozone countries, we find that the credit-implied risk premium positively forecasts the dollar-euro exchange rate return at various horizons. Moreover, a currency strategy that exploits the informative content of our predictor generates substantial out-of-sample economic value against the na¨ıve random walk benchmark.

We show that coherent risk measures alone are ineffective in curbing the behaviour of investors with limited liability or excessive tail-risk seeking behaviour if the market admits statistical arbitrage opportunities which we term ρ -arbitrage for a risk measure ρ . We show how to determine analytically whether such ρ -arbitrage portfolios exist in complete markets and in the Markowitz model. We also consider realistic numerical examples of incomplete markets and determine whether Expected-Shortfall arbitrage exists in these markets. We find that the answer depends heavily upon the probability model selected by the risk manager but that it is certainly possible for expected shortfall constraints to be ineffective in realistic markets. Since value at risk constraints are weaker than expected shortfall constraints, our results can be applied to value at risk.

We examine the connection between firm performance and a CEO's previous position (inside or outside the firm), using Covid-19 as an exogenous shock. Firms led by insider CEOs outperformed those led by outsider CEOs in terms of return on assets during the Covid-19 crisis period in 2020, but there was no performance differential in the period before the crisis. Additional tests indicate that outperformance under insider CEOs is observed in firms holding more cash and firms with a higher proportion of internally promoted non-CEO executives. These findings have important implications for boards of directors making CEO appointments.

The forecasting literature has presented overwhelming evidence that the aggregation of heterogeneous expectations leads to improvements in forecast accuracy; however, outperforming a simple equal weight- ing scheme has proved challenging. This paper proposes an aggregation scheme of subjective bond return expectations based on the historical accuracy of professional interest rate forecasters. Our aggregate belief proxy outperforms equal weight and median weight combinations and is comparable to statistical projections even if its dynamics are quite different. With this measure at hand, we study the relationship between quantities of risk and compensation for risk and demonstrate a strong link to subjective expectations even if this is difficult to detect using realised returns.

The effect of regulatory standards regarding the presentation of investment products on financial behavior is poorly understood. In two incentivized online experiments (N = 2,221) we examine the impact of information-based and tool-based guidance on the selection of retirement plan investment funds. Participants chose between funds that followed identical investment strategies but charged different fees. Over multiple trials, participants were instructed to identify the fund which charged the lowest fees given their hypothetical plan balance. Defaults and disclosures were found to be situationally helpful, but highlighted participants' naivete with regard to the calculations underlying the fee structure. Advice tended to be underutilized but was beneficial when sought. Tool-based guidance in the form of a smart calculator had a moderate impact on accuracy but benefits did not persist. Together the results highlight the danger of taking a homogeneous approach to financial guidance and emphasize the need to build consumer competency.

We investigate whether the market for ICOs in 2017–2018 and 2021 showed signs of contagion from prices of Bitcoin and Ether. During phases of optimism, ICO daily returns display low correlations with those of Bitcoin or Ether. But when the bubble bursts, correlations jump to very high levels, signaling that the ICO market becomes a sideshow of the cryptocurrency dynamics. We demonstrate that this high correlation was not present during the Nasdaq bubble in the 1990s, signaling that the price dynamics of digital tokens seems to be driven by a common factor, much more than in previous bubbles.

We establish a rigorous duality theory, under No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk, for an infinite horizon problem of optimal consumption in the presence of an income stream that can terminate randomly at an exponentially distributed time, independent of the asset prices. We thus close a duality gap encountered by Vellekoop and Davis in a version of this problem in a Black-Scholes market. Many of the classical tenets of duality theory hold, with the notable exception that marginal utility at zero initial wealth is finite. We use as dual variables a class of supermartingale deflators such that deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption in excess of income is a supermartingale. We show that the space of discounted local martingale deflators is dense in our dual domain, so that the dual problem can also be expressed as an infimum over the discounted local martingale deflators. We characterise the optimal wealth process, showing that optimal deflated wealth is a potential decaying to zero, while deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption over income is a uniformly integrable martingale at the optimum. We apply the analysis to the Vellekoop and Davis example and give a numerical solution., Major revision of earlier paper entitled "Duality and deep learning for optimal consumption with randomly terminating income". arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2006.04687, arXiv:2009.00972

We propose a methodology for estimating and testing beta-pricing models when a large number of assets is available for investment but the number of time-series observations is fixed. We first consider the case of correctly specified models with constant risk premia, and then extend our framework to deal with time-varying risk premia, potentially misspecified models, firm characteristics, and unbalanced panels. We show that our large cross-sectional framework poses a serious challenge to common empirical findings regarding the validity of beta-pricing models. In the context of pricing models with Fama-French factors, firm characteristics are found to explain a much larger proportion of variation in estimated expected returns than betas. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We consider market players with tail-risk-seeking behaviour modelled by S-shaped utility, as introduced by Kahneman and Tversky. We argue that risk measures such as value at risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) are ineffective in constraining such players, as such measures cannot reduce the traders expected S-shaped utilities. Indeed, when designing payoffs aiming to maximize utility under a VaR or ES risk limit, the players will attain the same supremum of expected utility with or without VaR or ES limits. By contrast, we show that risk management constraints based on a second more conventional concave utility function can reduce the maximum S-shaped utility that can be achieved by the investor. Indeed, product designs leading to progressively larger S-shaped utilities will lead to progressively lower expected constraining conventional utilities, violating the related risk limit. These results hold in a variety of market models, including the Black Scholes options model, and are particularly relevant for risk managers given the historical role of VaR and the endorsement of ES by the Basel committee in 2012–2013.

We study the impact of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) guarantees on the market for retail deposits. Exploiting information about all personal deposit accounts in Denmark and salient changes to the deposit insurance limit, we provide evidence that systemically important banks successfully retain and attract uninsured deposits in a crisis at the expense of other banks even as they differentially lower their interest rates. The funding shock suffered by nonsystemic banks causes a decrease in their lending. The results point to the distortive effects of TBTF guarantees in the market for retail deposits. Received March 15, 2018; editorial decision January 15, 2019 by Philip Strahan.

Identifying the effects of “flights to safety” on asset prices using pure time-series methods is difficult because crises are infrequent. We develop a new cross-sectional identification approach, motivated by the insight that investors may differ in their “preferred habitats” within a broad asset class. We apply the method to the question of whether foreign capital is responsible for residential real estate price movements in global cities such as London and New York, especially during crises. Using large data sets of housing transactions, we find that foreign risk strongly affects London house prices. The effects are long-lasting, and are associated with both safe-haven effects and immigration.

We ask whether the correlation between mortgage leverage and default is due to moral hazard (the causal effect of leverage) or adverse selection (ex ante risky borrowers choosing larger loans). We separate these information asymmetries using a natural experiment resulting from the contract structure of option adjustable-rate mortgages and unexpected 2008 divergence of indexes that determine rate adjustments. Our point estimates suggest that moral hazard is responsible for 40$\%$ of the correlation in our sample, while adverse selection explains 60$\%$. We calibrate a simple model to show that leverage regulation must weigh default prevention against distortions due to adverse selection.

In this paper we quantify the differences between market and regulatory assessments of bank portfolio risk, and thereby demonstrate that larger differences significantly reduce corporate lending rates. Specifically, to entice borrowers, banks reduce spreads by approximately 4.3% following a one standard deviation increase in our measure for bank asset-risk differences. This is equivalent to an interest income loss of USD 2.03 million on a loan of average size and duration. The separate effects of market and regulatory risk are much less potent. Our study reveals a disciplinary-competition effect in favor of corporate borrowers when there is information asymmetry between investors and bank regulators.

Building parable economies embedding econometricians, we view alternative estimators (Instrumental variables, fuzzy regression discontinuity, natural experiments, OLS, event studies) from the perspective of privately informed decision-makers, e.g., CFOs. Instrumental variable estimates can be misleading since randomization through observable instruments eliminates signal content arising from discretion. If the goal is informing discretionary decisions, rather than predicting outcomes after forced/mistaken actions, instrumentation is problematic, whereas OLS or event studies can be sufficient. The analysis shows that the utility of alternative estimators hinges upon often neglected assumptions about agent/econometrician information sets, as distinct from exclusion restrictions. We recommend parable economy estimation before real-world IV estimation.

This paper not only provides a theoretical model for the value-at-risk of active and passive trading strategies but also discusses the substantial implications relevant to risk management. Our results suggest that, first, passive strategies are riskier than active trading strategies based on historical returns, such as momentum and contrarian strategies. Second, momentum (contrarian) trading is riskier in a bull (bear) market. Third, the value-at-risk of momentum (contrarian) strategies has a positive relation to the absolute value of the return autocorrelation, as well as a positive (negative) relation with the state of the market. Further, momentum trading strategies give a superior risk-adjusted performance compared with other strategies in international stock markets. Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved. You may share this content using our article tools. Copying this content is for the sole use of the Authorised User (named subscriber), as outlined in our terms and conditions - https://www.infopro-insight.com/terms-conditions/insight-subscriptions/ If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@risk.net

Using household surveys and bank penetration data at the district-level in 2006 and 2009, this paper examines the impact of Equity Bank -- a leading private commercial bank focusing on microfinance -- on access to banking in Kenya. Unlike other commercial banks in Kenya, Equity Bank pursues distinct branching strategies that target underserved areas and less-privileged households. Equity Bank presence has a positive and significant impact on households'use of bank accounts and bank credit, especially for Kenyans with low income, no salaried job, and less education and those who do not own their own home. The findings are robust to using the district-level proportion of people speaking a minority language as an instrument for Equity Bank presence. It appears that Equity Bank's business model -- providing financial services to population segments typically ignored by traditional commercial banks and generating sustainable profits in the process -- can be a solution to the financial access problem that has hindered the development of inclusive financial sectors in many African countries.

We investigate the connections between bank capital regulation and the prevalence of lightly regulated nonbanks (shadow banks) in the U.S. corporate loan market. For identification, we exploit a supervisory credit register of syndicated loans, loan-time fixed effects, and shocks to capital requirements arising from surprise features of the U.S. implementation of Basel III. We find that less-capitalized banks reduce loan retention, particularly among loans with higher capital requirements and at times when capital is scarce, and nonbanks step in. This reallocation is associated with important adverse effects during the 2008 crisis: loans funded by nonbanks with fragile liabilities are less likely to be rolled over and experience greater price volatility. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the ECO2015-68182-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) grant and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563).

Are all covenants equally effective at reducing the bondholder-shareholder conflict? Examining the most frequently used bond covenants, we document that four out of 24 restrictions are associated with significantly higher bankruptcy risk. The use of these Default Indicating covenants can be partly explained by faulty contract design, greater recovery in bankruptcy, or within-creditor conflicts. Firms that use In-House Counsel to help structure their bond issue and those that use Big 4 Auditors are also less likely to include Default Indicating covenants in their bonds. Further tests show that the use of these Default Indicating covenants is associated with higher bond and CDS spreads. Overall, the results help explain the prior evidence on the relation between covenant use and the cost of debt. Accepted version

We address the determination of bitcoin prices and decentralized security. Users forecast the transactional and resale values of holdings, pricing the risk of systemic attacks. Miners contribute resources to protect against attackers and compete for block rewards. Bitcoin’s design leads to multiple equilibria: the same blockchain technology is consistent with sharply different price and security levels. Bitcoin’s monetary policy can lead to welfare losses and deviations from quantity theory. Price-security feedback amplifies fundamental shocks’ volatility impact and leads to boom and busts unconnected to fundamentals. We characterize how viability versus fiat currency depends on bitcoin’s relative acceptability and inflation protection.

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. We examine the inducement effect of labor cost on corporate innovation in emerging markets. To establish causality, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach, based on the variations generated by the passage of the new Labor Contract Law in China, as well as an instrumental variable approach. We find the inducement effect of labor cost is more pronounced for Chinese non-state-owned enterprises, firms without political connections, and firms with low labor productivity. Our results support the induced innovation hypothesis in that increases in wages will induce invention and technology adoption, but also suggest that government intervention through state ownership and political connections largely decreases this inducement effect. Our findings have implications for emerging markets regarding the transition from a low-cost labor development model to an innovation-driven growth model.

We study quantitatively how uncertainty in expected stock return predictability affects life-cycle portfolio choice and wealth accumulation in the presence of undiversifiable labor income risk. Households filter information about future expected returns from observed predictors and realized stock returns. Therefore, optimal portfolio choice does not only depend on financial wealth and age, as in more traditional life-cycle models. Counterfactuals demonstrate the magnitude of portfolio demand changes that depend on perceptions about underlying expected returns. On average, life-cycle asset allocation becomes more conservative than models with either i.i.d. stock returns, or with clearer signals about expected stock returns.

The use of photographs has become a key feature of corporate reporting in the last decades. As a form of impression management, photographs may be designed to influence investors’ judgments. Where a paucity of research on the use of photographs in corporate reports exists, this short communication discusses two important photographic features that can frame judgments — its ability to attract attention and convey emotions with simplicity. Usually, the non-creative content of photographs, such as size, is responsible for capturing our attention, while its creative content influences cognition and judgments through the elicitation of specific emotional responses. The use of photographs is now a norm and this letter will help open new avenues of behavioral research and methodologies.