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We investigate the compensation of counterparty exposure in the prices of structured products. Our analysis reveals that product issuers did not compensate retail investors for counterparty exposure before the Lehman default. Post‐Lehman, retail prices have no longer neglected this risk. We also measure retail investor attention towards issuer credit risk. For a given level of issuer credit risk, counterparty exposure is compensated more when attention is higher. Furthermore, issuers tend to construct products with larger counterparty exposure. Overall, our results shed light on the conditions under which financial engineering generates neglected risk.

Does earnings management, even though legal, hinder investor trust in reported earnings? Or do investors regard earnings management as a way for firms to convey private information, or simply as a neutral feature of financial reporting? We find that past abstinence from earnings management increases investor responses to future earnings surprises. Importantly, this effect occurs in industries where investor trust has recently been violated, and where managers would in the past have had incentives and opportunities to misrepresent earnings. Overall, investors seem to interpret the extent to which management resists temptations for misreporting as a "litmus test" of trustworthiness.

Market reactions to the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) provide new insights into how real shocks and financial policies drive firm value. Initially, internationally oriented firms, especially those more exposed to trade with China, underperformed. As the virus spread to Europe and the United States, corporate debt and cash holdings emerged as important value drivers, relevant even after the Fed intervened in the bond market. The content and tone of conference calls mirror this development over time. Overall, the results illustrate how anticipated real effects from the health crisis, a rare disaster, were amplified through financial channels. (JEL G01, G12, G14, G32, F14) Received: May 27, 2020; editorial decision June 16, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul. 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.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election and his nomination of climate skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations about U.S. policy toward climate change. Joseph Biden’s 2020 election shifted them dramatically upward. We study firms’ stock-price movements in reaction to these changes. As expected, the 2016 election boosted carbon-intensive firms. Surprisingly, firms with climate-responsible strategies also gained, especially those firms held by long-run investors. Such investors appear to have bet on a “boomerang” in climate policy. Harbingers of a boomerang appeared during Trump’s term. The 2020 election marked its arrival. (JEL G14, G38, G41)

We argue that incentives to take equity risk (”equity incentives”) only partially capture incentives to take asset risk (“asset incentives”). This is because leverage, while central to the theory of risk-shifting, is not explicitly considered by equity incentives. Employing measures of asset incentives that account for leverage, we find that asset risk-taking incentives can be large compared to incentives to increase firm value. Stock holdings can induce substantial risk-taking incentives, contrary to the assumption that only stock options drive risk-taking. Finally, asset incentives help explain asset risk-taking of U.S. financial institutions before the 2007/08 crisis.

We sketch possible linkages between features of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and outcomes of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. We start from three features of the financial crisis, i.e. (1) costly bank bailouts, (2) constrained SME credit, and (3) strict bank regulation. We then discuss their intermediate outcomes in terms of: (1) sovereign debt accumulation and possible cuts in public health spending, (2) the slowing of economic growth and labour mobility; and (3) bank zombie lending, to arrive at the COVID-19 pandemic severity in terms of infection and death rates and the difficulties in designing and implementing economic support policies.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) slashed corporations’ median effective tax rates from 31.7% to 20.8%. Nevertheless, 15% of firms experienced an increase. One fifth of firms recorded nonrecurring tax costs or benefits exceeding 3% of total assets. Proxies that existing studies employ to assess the TCJA’s impacts account for just half of actual impacts. Stock prices impounded those proxies during the legislative process. Total impacts were impounded the following year, once firms published their financials. These results indicate that investors find it hard to predict even large and immediate changes to company cash flows due to unfamiliar events.

The stock market provides a view of what investors expect for the future. It is precisely in complex situations such as the COVID-19 outbreak that the prescience of the market is particularly valuable, argues Alexander F. Wagner.

The negativity of managerial word choice (managerial tone) in conference calls is a telltale indicator of a company’s future. Specifically, increases in negativity–what we term “bleak tone changes”...

Market reactions to the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) provide new insights into how real shocks and financial policies drive firm value. Initially, internationally oriented firms, especially those more exposed to trade with China, underperformed. As the virus spread to Europe and the United States, corporate debt and cash holdings emerged as important value drivers, relevant even after the Fed intervened in the bond market. The content and tone of conference calls mirror this development over time. Overall, the results illustrate how anticipated real effects from the health crisis, a rare disaster, were amplified through financial channels.

Institutional investors played a crucial role in the COVID-19 market crash. U.S. stocks with higher institutional ownership -- in particular, those held more by active, short-term, and domestic institutions -- performed worse. An analysis of changes in holdings through the first quarter of 2020 reveals that mutual funds, investment advisors, and pension funds favored stocks with strong financials (low debt and high cash), whereas hedge funds sold stocks indiscriminately. None of these institutional investor groups appear to have actively tilted their portfolios toward firms with better environmental and social performance. Data from a large discount brokerage indicate that retail investors acted as liquidity providers. Overall, the results suggest that when a tail risk realizes, institutional investors express a preference for "hard" measures of firm resilience.

Donald Trump's surprise election shifted expectations: corporate taxes would be lower and trade policies more restrictive. Relative stock prices responded appropriately. High-tax firms and those with large deferred tax liabilities (DTLs) gained; those with significant deferred tax assets from net operating loss carryforwards (NOL DTAs) lost. Domestically focused companies fared better than internationally oriented firms. A price contribution analysis shows that easily assessed consequences (DTLs, NOL DTAs, tax rates) were priced faster than more complex issues (net DTLs, foreign exposure). In sum, the analysis demonstrates that expectations about tax rates greatly impact firm values.

Does the presence of immigrants in one's neighborhood affect voting for far right-wing parties? We study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) that, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, increased its vote share from less than 5% in the early 1980s to 27% by the end of the 1990s and continued to attract more than 20% of voters in the 2013 national election. We find that the inflow of immigrants into a community has a significant impact on the increase in the community's voting share for the FPÖ, explaining roughly a tenth of the regional variation in vote changes. Our results suggest that voters worry about adverse labor market effects of immigration, as well as about the quality of their neighborhood. In fact, we find evidence of a negative impact of immigration on "compositional amenities”. In communities with larger immigration influx, Austrian children commute longer distances to school, and fewer daycare resources are provided. We do not find evidence that Austrians move out of communities with increasing immigrant presence.

A major obstacle for research in international asset pricing and corporate finance has been a lack of reliable and publicly available data on international common risk factors and portfolios. To address this gap, we provide a step-by-step description of how appropriately screened data from Thomson Reuters Datastream and Thomson Reuters Worldscope can be used to construct high-quality systematic risk factors. We provide common risk factors for 23 countries across the globe. To demonstrate the use of this dataset, we present evidence of an “extreme” size premium in a large number of countries. These premia, however, are often not realizable or at least significantly eroded due to transaction costs.

Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more "intangibles talk" complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to the acquirer is questionable: One standard deviation more in intangibles talk results in 0.45 percentage points lower abnormal announcement returns of bidders. Agency problems explain little of these results. Instead, payment mode choices and insider trades suggest that intangibles talk reflects managerial overoptimism. Overall, takeover announcements can provide important information regarding the quality of deals.

Low-carbon mutual funds allow investors to purchase lower exposure to climate change risk at the cost of lower sectoral diversification. On balance, this proposition proves to be appealing for investors, as seen from the effect on fund flows of the introduction of Morningstar's "Low Carbon Designation", and of subsequent updates. Active funds that missed the label at its initial release later shifted their holdings towards less carbon-intensive firms. The competition of intermediaries for investment flows along climate performance can thus have far-reaching consequences for investors.

Proponents of the concept of “value reporting” emphasize the idea that it may be in firms’ interest to provide investors and other stakeholders with a holistic picture of their value generation activities. The basic idea is that by explaining more clearly how and why value is created in the company, especially by considering the interplay of financial and non-financial value drivers, management will enhance its own understanding of the value generation process. This, in turn, enables management to make better operating decisions in the future. Using a 10-year panel of Swiss firms, we document that firms with better value reporting quality deliver better future operating performance and obtain greater economic value added. They also exhibit higher valuation ratios. These results hold when controlling for industry-year fixed effects as well as with two instrumental variables approaches. These findings also shed light on the potential value generation benefits of “integrated reporting”.

Corporate fraud and managerial deception have been pervasive and value-destroying in recent decades. This column analyses whether investors form views about a CEO’s honesty based on his or her previous actions, and how this affects investment decisions. A CEO who has resisted, at personal cost, engaging in earnings management is perceived as being more committed to honesty, which appeals to pro­-social investors. Pro-self investors, on the other hand, value honesty when it comes to information regarding investment returns.

Donald Trump's election and his nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on US climate-change policy. We study firms' stock-price reactions and institutional investors' portfolio adjustments after these events. As expected, carbon-intensive firms benefited. Should not companies with responsible strategies on climate change have lost value, since they were paying for actions that were now less urgent? In fact, investors actually rewarded such firms. The premium the firms received resulted, at least in part, from the move into climate-responsible stocks by long-horizon investors presumably expecting a post-Trump rebound to green policy.

Massive dollars shuttled back and forth among firms on the twisted path to and passage of the 2017 tax reform. Prices of individual stocks responded to the difference between initial and revised expectations. From the bill's initiation in the House to final passage, high-tax firms gained significantly, given the dramatic cut from 35 percent to 21 percent in the corporate tax rate. Internationally-oriented firms suffered notably, since investors assessed that the surprisingly high repatriation tax outweighed the benefits from territorial taxation. Daily price movements show that the aggregate market responded positively to lower expected taxes.

Donald Trump's 2016 election and his nomination of climate skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on U.S. policy toward climate change. Joseph Biden's 2020 election shifted them dramatically upward. We study firms' stock-price movements in reaction to these changes. As expected, the 2016 election boosted carbon-intensive firms. Surprisingly, firms with climate-responsible strategies also gained, especially those firms held by long-run investors. Such investors appear to have bet on a "boomerang" in climate policy. Harbingers of a boomerang appeared during Trump's term. The 2020 election marked its arrival.

Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs are straight talkers. Others, by contrast, are vague talkers. Vague talkers routinely use qualifying words indicating uncertainty, such as “approximately”, “probably”, or “maybe”. Analysts and the stock market attend to the style of managerial talk. They find earnings news less informative when managers are vague; they respond less and more slowly as a result. Thus, quantitative information and straightforward contextual information prove to be complements. Vague communications have the potential benefit of tamping down over-optimistic analysts expectations.

The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America on 11/8/2016 came as a surprise. Markets responded swiftly and decisively. This note investigates both the initial stock market reaction to the election, and the longer-term reaction through the end of 2016. We find that the individual stock price reactions to the election – that is, the market’s vote – reflect investor expectations on economic growth, taxes, and trade policy. Heavy industry and banking were relative winners, whereas healthcare, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and apparel were among the relative losers. High-beta stocks and companies with a hitherto high tax burden benefited from the election. Although internationally-oriented companies may profit under some plans of the new administration, several other arguments suggest a more favorable climate for domestically-oriented companies. Investors have found the domestic-favoring arguments to be stronger. While investors incorporated the expected consequences of the election for US growth and tax policy into prices relatively quickly, it took them more time to digest the consequences of shifts in trade policy on firms’ prospects. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We establish that CEOs of companies experiencing volatile industry conditions are more likely to be dismissed. At the same time, accounting for various other factors, industry risk is unlikely to be associated with CEO compensation other than through dismissal risk. Using this identification strategy, we document that CEO turnover risk is significantly positively associated with compensation. This finding is important because job-risk-compensating wage differentials arise naturally in competitive labor markets. By contrast, the evidence rejects an entrenchment model according to which powerful CEOs have lower job risk and at the same time secure higher compensation.

A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal’s children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more “productive” agents are also more risk-tolerant (as holds in the sample of individuals we surveyed), the principal can screen agents and bolster target efficiency by offering a choice between a nonrandom budget and a two-outcome risky budget. When, at very low allocations, the ratio of the more risk-averse type’s marginal utility to that of the other type is unbounded above (e.g., as with CRRA), the first-best is approached.—A biblical opening enlivens the analysis.

Wealth management constitutes an important aspect of today's banking world, but very little is known about what explains the differences among banks in their ability to attract new assets under management. Using a unique panel database of Swiss private banks, we test the hypothesis that the performance of a bank in attracting new money depends on two input factors: skill and reputation. We first estimate the unobservable skill of a bank as a deviation of observed cost efficiency from expected efficiency. In a second step, we find that relatively skilled banks -- that is, banks that are more cost-efficient than predicted by their input factors -- also perform better in attracting net new money. We also find that negative media coverage (such as in the context of fraudulent business practices related to tax evasion) strongly diminishes the future ability to attract assets under management, especially at small banks. Thus, adding to the explicit fines that many Swiss banks had to pay in the course of the U.S. Department of Justice's investigations, there are substantial implicit and reputational costs to banks. Consistent with the notion that trust plays an important role, banks with a higher service intensity (number of employees per assets under management) attract more future funds; by contrast, investment performance for clients seems not to explain future net new money growth.

Whether a country is able effectively to address collective action problems is a critical test of its ability to fulfill the demands of its citizens to their satisfaction. We study one particularly important collective action problem: the environment. Using a large panel dataset covering 25 years for some countries, we find that, overall, citizens of European countries are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country if (a) more environmental policies are in place and if (b) expenditures on the environment are higher, but environmental taxes are lower. The relation between environmental policy and life satisfaction is not as pronounced. The evidence for the effect of environmental quality on both satisfaction with democracy and life satisfaction is not very clear, although we find evidence that citizens value personal mobility (in terms of having a car) highly, but view the presence of trucks as unpleasant. We also document that parents, younger citizens, and those with high levels of educational attainment tend to care more about environmental issues than do non-parents, older citizens, and those with fewer years of schooling.

We review and examine three market-based instruments to address the challenge of climate change: emission trading, emission taxes, and hybrid instruments. Our main contribution is the illustration and comparison of these instruments using recent results from theoretical research and practical policy experience. Hybrid policies that aim to combine taxes and permits emerge as a promising way forward. An additional contribution is that we also comment on two other related concepts, namely, innovation strategies and prediction markets. For the former, we show that, to make economic sense, the much publicized Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate has to rely on the same basic tool as the other instruments, namely, relative prices. For the latter, we discuss how prediction markets can complement traditional scenario analysis by experts. They are likely to improve the practical implementation of all previously discussed methods.

This article examines the recent regulatory developments with regard to short selling. Short selling regulation is an important factor in firm governance because it affects the way in which firms are subject to market discipline. As the financial crisis has attracted regulators’ notice to short selling once again, it is important to understand the fundamental legal and economic arguments regarding short selling. These arguments have at their core the question of whether there exists a market failure. The available evidence on balance suggests that short selling restrictions hamper the price discovery process. Also, while regulations against market abuse are required, it is often an ineffective detour to pursue the goal of fair markets through the regulation of short selling. On the basis of these arguments, the article evaluates the approaches taken by the US and UK regulators, who play a leading part in the current movement towards more comprehensive short selling regulation. The US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) recently adopted rules do not seem to bring much added value and will presumably affect market efficiency in the negative. First principles suggest a somewhat more positive stance on the SEC's proposal for a circuit breaker rule and the UK. Financial Services Authority's proposed disclosure approach, though both are subject to caveats. We also highlight some central questions for future research.

Competent public agencies are associated with better economic outcomes. Beyond competence, political leaders need to secure the loyalty of their agencies. Unfortunately, several theories predict a tradeoff between these two valued features. This paper finds that recruitment into agencies is meritocratic where (1) agency officials have poor outside options, (2) careers in agencies are long-lasting, and (3) agency loyalty is important. Moreover, agency competence is lower when (4) loyalty is important but the time horizon is short, and (5) outside opportunities improve but the time horizon is long. This evidence fits best with a theory of loyalty as non-contractible behavior.

This paper analyses how institutional factors affect satisfaction with democracy (SWD). It employs a panel of observations from Eurobarometers in the time span 1990–2000, and thus is one of the first studies to consider the longitudinal dimension of the driving forces of SWD. We find that high-quality institutions like the rule of law, well-functioning regulation, low corruption, and other institutions that improve resource allocation have a positive effect on average satisfaction with democracy.

This paper explores the implications for investment firms and clients that arise out of an interpretation of the Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) best execution requirements from a law and economics perspective. While best execution is often framed as a matter of investor protection, research on market microstructure suggests that there is, in fact, an efficiency rationale (and not only a distributional rationale) for having some degree of best execution regulation. In terms of the specific rules of MiFID, the analysis reveals that an investment firm’s best execution policy will play a central role. MiFID’s best execution concept is process- based, ie investment firms need to show that they took measures leading to best execution in expectation; actual best execution is not required. The paper also discusses current issues such as the form of the execution policy and the appropriate number of execution venues.

This chapter starts by reflecting on the notion of "value" in economics. It then describes how economic decision-making models are framed and examines their moral dimension. The foundations of traditional economic decision-making models contrast with the emphasis of psychological research on the role of deontological considerations in decision-making. The focus is on a specific deontological value, so called "protected values". The chapter describes the main characteristics of individuals endowed with protected values in particular when these values focus on honesty, and reviews experimental evidence on the role of protected values for honesty in economic decision-making. Finally, some speculative thoughts are offered on the relevance of research on moral values for business policies, incentive design, and regulation. Also discussed are some open research questions regarding the role of moral values in economic decision-making.

Stock prices react significantly to the tone (negativity of words) managers use on earnings conference calls. This reaction reflects reasonably rational use of information. “Tone surprise” – the residual when negativity in managerial tone is regressed on the firm’s recent economic performance and CEO fixed effects – predicts future earnings and analyst uncertainty. Prices move more, as hypothesized, in firms where tone surprise predicts more strongly. Experienced analysts respond appropriately in revising their forecasts; inexperienced analysts overreact (underreact) to tone surprises in presentations (answers). Post-call price drift, like post-earnings announcement drift, suggests less-than-full-use of information embedded in managerial tone.

Conference call tone predicts future earnings and uncertainty. “Tone disappointment” (excessive negativity) predicts more strongly than “tone delight” (excessive positivity). However, analysts and investors respond more quickly to delight than disappointment. Consequently, stock prices drift downward after their initial reaction to tone disappointment. Tone surprises move stock prices more in those firms where tone surprise predicts earnings and uncertainty more strongly. These results hold even after controlling for negativity of words in the earnings press release, analyst expectations, the firm’s recent performance, and CEO fixed effects. Together, these coherent results suggest that market participants distill value-relevant information from conference calls.

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the effect is likely to be permanent. Yet, there is no conclusive evidence for a global factor model catch-up in terms of pricing errors (alpha) or a convergence in country-specific factor premia. These findings suggest that global financial markets have progressed surprisingly little towards fully integrated pricing, different from what should be expected under financial market integration. We discuss alternative explanations for these patterns and assess implications for practice.

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize an open access good. In particular, the demand for state fishing licenses is used to infer the benefits of recreational fishing. Using panel data on state fishing license sales and prices for the continental United States over a 15-year period, combined with data on substitute prices and demographic variables, a license demand function is estimated with instrumental variable procedures to allow for the potential endogeneity of administered prices. The econometric results lead to estimates of the benefits of a fishing license, and subsequently to the expected benefits of a recreational fishing day. In contrast with previous studies, which have utilized travel cost or hypothetical market methods, our approach provides estimates that are directly comparable across geographic areas. Our findings show substantial variation in the value of a recreational fishing day across geographic areas in the United States. This suggests that current practice of using benefits estimates from one part of the country in national or regional analyses may lead to substantial bias in benefits estimates.

Executive compensation has increased dramatically over the past 15 years, but so has forced CEO turnover. We argue that part of the development of CEO pay can be explained by the adverse consequences that forced turnover implies for a CEO. We ¯nd that for the CEOs of the largest US corporations, a one percentage point increase in exogenous turnover risk is associated with $40,000 to $90,000 more in terms of total compensation. The size of this risk premium is in line with estimates of the importance of career concerns and forfeiture risk. This relation survives a test of reverse causation and controlling for unobserved ¯rm heterogeneity. We argue that the robustly positive correlation between turnover and compensation is not consistent with a view of entrenched CEOs setting their own compensation and turnover risk.

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we expose participants to situational social norms of approval or disapproval of lying. While participants on average conform to the situational pressure, the results highlight important differences in individual reactions. Situational norms crowd out intrinsic preferences for truthfulness; conversely, these preferences support resistance against "bad" norms. The extent and direction of the interaction of individual characteristics with situational norms and with economic incentives shed light on why people act truthfully. Out of several possible explanations, self-signaling under situational pressure provides the most convincing account of the evidence from the experiment.

This paper investigates neglected risk in structured products. We compare retail prices of structured products with prices available to institutional investors to replicate the same products. Issuers do not compensate retail investors for counterparty exposure before the Lehman default even when replication prices reflect this risk. After Lehman, retail investors no longer neglect issuer credit risk, and issuers compensate counterparty exposure. Retail investor attention crucially determines the occurrence of neglected risk. Additionally, issuers have a propensity to construct products with larger counterparty exposure. Overall, our results shed light on the conditions under which financial engineering generates neglected risk.