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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.

Climate finance is first and foremost a risk-management problem, which means three things for investors. First, prudent investors will seek to hedge climate change risk by reducing their exposure to this risk. Second, investors will demand compensation for holding this risk. Third, investors will engage with companies to urge them to reduce this risk if they are not adequately compensated for it. For companies, the main implication of climate-risk management by investors is that the companies with greater carbon emissions will have to pay a higher financial cost of carbon (FCC). In their new study described in this article, the authors undertake a comprehensive analysis of the risk compensation implications of exposing investors to carbon transition risk. They explore how corporate GHG emissions have affected the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios of listed companies in Europe and the U.S. over the period 2016 to 2020. Their main finding is that financial markets are beginning to broadly discount companies whose high carbon emissions are viewed as subjecting them to higher levels of political and regulatory risk, and providing them with what amounts to a higher cost of capital. Although price-earnings ratios are generally lower for companies with higher emissions, the discount varies significantly by sector and across firm size, with larger companies experiencing the larger discounts. Although the carbon discount is similar in the U.S. and in Europe, the authors find significantly higher discounts in industries in Europe that are directly covered by carbon pricing through the EU ETS. They even find a small price discount on corporate debt for smaller issuers. Overall, what emerges is a clear pattern of investors' growing concern over climate risk, which translates into an increasingly material FCC for companies with high GHG emissions. This growing valuation discount for companies with high emissions should encourage them to progress further along their decarbonization path, which our results suggest have large financial as well as other social benefits.

This article generalises the concept of realised covariation to Hilbert-space-valued stochastic processes. More precisely, based on high-frequency functional data, we construct an estimator of the trace-class operator-valued integrated volatility process arising in general mild solutions of Hilbert space-valued stochastic evolution equations in the sense of Da Prato and Zabczyk (2014). We prove a weak law of large numbers for this estimator, where the convergence is uniform on compacts in probability with respect to the Hilbert-Schmidt norm. In addition, we show that the conditions on the volatility process are valid for most common stochastic volatility models in Hilbert spaces., Comment: 34 pages

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

Resource-constrained new ventures need to decide how to allocate their scarce resources to develop internal functional capabilities in order to survive and grow. Drawing on the longitudinal Kauffman Firm Survey of U.S. start-ups, we explore the performance implications of broad versus narrow scope in new firms' functional capability development and show that focus rather than breadth in capability development is conducive to higher revenue performance, although financial and knowledge resource availability moderate this relationship. Studying capability development in entrepreneurial firms informs our understanding of capability development in any firm competing under time and resource constraints.\ud \ud

This paper investigates the impact of international bank flows from G10 lender countries on income inequality in 74 borrower countries over 1999–2013. Specifically, we examine the role of international bank flows contingent upon the Basel 2 capital regulation and the level of financial market development in the borrower countries. First, we find that improvements in the borrower country risk weights due to rating upgrades under the Basel 2 framework significantly increase bank flows, leading to improvements in income inequality. Second, we find that the level of financial market development is also important. We report that a well-functioning financial market helps the poor access credit and thereby reduces inequality. Moreover, we employ threshold estimations to identify the thresholds for each of the financial development measures that borrower countries need to reach before realizing the potential reductions in income inequality from international bank financing.

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 provide a unified treatment of pathwise Large and Moderate deviations principles for a general class of multidimensional stochastic Volterra equations with singular kernels, not necessarily of convolution form. Our methodology is based on the weak convergence approach by Budhijara, Dupuis and Ellis. We show in particular how this framework encompasses most rough volatility models used in mathematical finance and generalises many recent results in the literature., 39 pages

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.

Australian regulations strictly limit early withdrawals from retirement plan accounts. However, in 2020, the Government made otherwise illiquid plan balances temporarily liquid, offering emergency relief during the pandemic. The COVID-19 Early Release Scheme allowed participants in financial hardship easy access to up to $A20,000 of savings over two rounds. We use administrative and survey data from a large retirement plan to describe how and why participants withdrew savings under the scheme. A majority report that they needed the money immediately but around one quarter said they anticipated future needs. Most thought about the decision for less than a week, acted soon after each round opened, and withdrew as much as they could. Many people did not estimate, or appear to have mis-estimated, the impact the withdrawal could have on their retirement savings. Our findings offer insights into preferences for liquidity. They also raise questions about whether the features of the early release scheme, and their implied endorsement by the Government, influenced some withdrawers more than personal deliberations over financial welfare.

Evidence from many developed markets suggests that fundamental indices outperform capitalisation-weighted indices. Existing studies suspect a story of market mispricing, yet a mechanism has not been identified. Using Australian data, we study the relation between analyst forecast errors and the performance of various fundamental indices. We find that fundamental indices contain a relatively higher exposure to stocks with low analyst long-term growth forecasts. Valuations for these stocks are ex ante overly pessimistic and drive the statistical significance of alphas produced by fundamental indexation. We show how hedging against analyst forecast errors can generate additional alpha for investors using fundamental indexation.

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.

It is known since Kellerer (1972) that for any peacock process there exist mar-tingales with the same marginal laws. Nevertheless, there is no general method for finding such martingales that yields diffusions. Indeed, Kellerer's proof is not constructive: finding the dynamics of processes associated to a given peacock is not trivial in general. In this paper we are interested in the uniform peacock that is, the peacock with uniform law at all times on a generic time-varying support [a(t), b(t)]. We derive explicitly the corresponding Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) and prove that, under certain conditions on the boundaries a(t) and b(t), they admit a unique strong solution yielding the relevant diffusion process. We discuss the relationship between our result and the previous derivation of diffusion processes associated to square-root and linear time-boundaries, emphasizing the cases where our approach adds strong uniqueness, and study the local time and activity of the solution processes. We then study the peacock with uniform law at all times on a constant support [−1, 1] and derive the SDE of an associated mean-reverting diffusion process with uniform margins that is not a martingale. For the related SDE we prove existence of a solution in [0, T ]. Finally, we provide a numerical case study showing that these processes have the desired uniform behaviour. These results may be used to model random probabilities, random recovery rates or random correlations.

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.