Journal of Finance

2023

Volume 78 Issue 6, December 2023 (14 Papers)

We reconsider trend-based predictability by employing flexible learning methods to identify price patterns that are highly predictive of returns, as opposed to testing predefined patterns like momentum or reversal. Our predictor data are stock-level price charts, allowing us to extract the most predictive price patterns using machine learning image analysis techniques. These patterns differ significantly from commonly analyzed trend signals, yield more accurate return predictions, enable more profitable investment strategies, and demonstrate robustness across specifications. Remarkably, they exhibit context independence, as short-term patterns perform well on longer time scales, and patterns learned from U.S. stocks prove effective in international markets.

The primary challenge to assessing the legal origins view of comparative financial development is identifying exogenous changes in legal systems. We assemble new data on Shanghai's British and French concessions between 1845 and 1936. Two regime changes altered British and French legal jurisdiction over their respective concessions. By examining the changing application of different legal traditions to adjacent neighborhoods within the same city and controlling for military, economic, and political characteristics, we offer new evidence consistent with the legal origins view: the financial development advantage in the British concession widened after Western legal jurisdiction intensified and narrowed after it abated.

Volume 78 Issue 5, October 2023 (12 Papers)

Angel investor tax credits are used globally to spur high-growth entrepreneurship. Exploiting their staggered implementation in 31 U.S. states, we find that they increase angel investment yet have no significant impact on entrepreneurial activity. Two mechanisms explain these results: crowding out of alternative financing and low sensitivity of professional investors to tax credits. With a large-scale survey and a stylized model, we show that low responsiveness among professional angels may reflect the fat-tailed return distributions that characterize high-growth startups. The results contrast with evidence that direct subsidies to firms have positive effects, raising concerns about promoting entrepreneurship with investor subsidies.

We examine whether and how firms structure their merger and acquisition deals to avoid antitrust scrutiny. There are approximately 40% more mergers and acquisitions (M&As) than expected just below deal value thresholds that trigger antitrust review. These “stealth acquisitions” tend to involve financial and governance contract terms that afford greater scope for negotiating and assigning lower deal values. We also show that the equity values, gross margins, and product prices of acquiring firms and their competitors increase following such acquisitions. Our results suggest that acquirers manipulate M&As to avoid antitrust scrutiny, thereby benefiting their own shareholders but potentially harming other corporate stakeholders.

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 to 2014 and exploit a long-standing currency peg as a source of exogenous variation in monetary policy. We find that gains from softer monetary policy in terms of income, wealth, and consumption are monotonically increasing in ex ante income. The distributional effects reflect systematic differences in exposure to the various channels of monetary policy, especially nonlabor channels (e.g., leverage and risky assets). Our estimates imply that softer monetary policy increases income inequality.

We document that central banks are discontinuously more likely to report slightly positive profits than slightly negative profits, especially when political pressure is greater, the public is more receptive to extreme political views, and central bank governors are eligible for reappointment. The propensity to report small profits over small losses is correlated with higher inflation and lower interest rates. We conclude that there are agency problems at central banks, which give rise to discontinuous profit incentives that correlate with central banks’ policy choices and outcomes. These findings inform the debate about the political economy of central banking and central bank design.

Volume 78 Issue 4, August 2023 (13 Papers)

Volume 78 Issue 3, June 2023 (12 Papers)

This paper studies the asset pricing implications of industrial pollution. A long-short portfolio constructed from firms with high versus low toxic emission intensity within an industry generates an average annual return of 4.42%, which remains significant after controlling for risk factors. This pollution premium cannot be explained by existing systematic risks, investor preferences, market sentiment, political connections, or corporate governance. We propose and model a new systematic risk related to environmental policy uncertainty. We use the growth in environmental litigation penalties to measure regime change risk and find that it helps price the cross section of emission portfolios' returns.

We develop a method that identifies the attention paid by earnings call participants to firms' climate change exposures. The method adapts a machine learning keyword discovery algorithm and captures exposures related to opportunity, physical, and regulatory shocks associated with climate change. The measures are available for more than 10,000 firms from 34 countries between 2002 and 2020. We show that the measures are useful in predicting important real outcomes related to the net-zero transition, in particular, job creation in disruptive green technologies and green patenting, and that they contain information that is priced in options and equity markets.

Revisions in successive Greenbook forecasts of quarterly real GDP growth proxy for news of current and expected future economic growth. In the sample 1975 through 2015, news of future growth is slightly negatively related to contemporaneous changes in Treasury bond yields, while news of current growth is strongly positively related to changes in these yields. Both results are difficult to reconcile with a representative agent's bondholding first-order condition. A continuous-time dynamic model of output attributes almost all of the covariation with yields to martingale innovations in log output and a minimal amount to innovations in the conditional drift of log output.

In the $793 billion Paycheck Protection Program, we examine metrics related to potential misreporting including nonregistered businesses, multiple businesses at residential addresses, abnormally high implied compensation per employee, and large inconsistencies with jobs reported in another government program. These measures consistently concentrate in certain FinTech lenders and are cross-verified by seven additional measures. FinTech market share increased significantly over time, and suspicious lending by FinTechs in 2021 is four times the level at the start of the program. Suspicious loans are being overwhelmingly forgiven at rates similar to other loans.

Volume 78 Issue 2, April 2023 (11 Papers)

Municipal bonds exhibit considerable retail pricing variation, even for same-size trades of the same bond on the same day, and even from the same dealer. Markups vary widely across dealers. Trading strongly clusters on eighth price increments, and clustered trades exhibit higher markups. Yields are often lowered to just above salient numbers. Machine learning estimates exploiting the richness of the data show that dealers that use strategic pricing have systematically higher markups. Recent Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board rules have had only a limited impact on markups. While a subset of dealers focus on best execution, many dealers appear focused on opportunistic pricing.

Recent local price growth explains differences in search behavior across prospective homebuyers. Those experiencing higher growth in their postcode of residence search more broadly across locations and house characteristics, without changing attention devoted to individual sales listings, and have shorter search duration. Effects are stronger for homeowners, in particular those living in less wealthy areas and looking for a new primary residence. We use reduced-form analysis and a quantitative equilibrium model to show that the expansion of search breadth translates into widespread spillovers onto house sales prices and inventories of listings across postcodes within a metropolitan area.

Using detailed transactions data across the United States, we find that single women earn 1.5 percentage points lower annualized returns on housing relative to single men. Forty-five percent of the gap is explained by transaction timing and location. The remaining gap arises from a 2% gender difference in execution prices at purchase and sale. Consistent with a negotiation channel, women list for less and experience worse negotiated discounts. The gender gap shrinks in tight markets, where negotiation is replaced by quasi-auctions. Overall, gender differences in housing explain 30% of the gender gap in wealth accumulation for the median household.

We study how a fiscal expansion via infrastructure investment influences the dynamic impacts of monetary stimulus on credit allocation. We develop a two-stage approach and apply it to the Chinese economy with a confidential loan-level data set that covers all sectors. We find that infrastructure investment significantly weakened monetary policy's transmission to credit allocated to private firms, while reinforcing the monetary effects on loans to state-owned firms. This fiscal-monetary interaction channel is key to understanding the preferential credit access enjoyed by state-owned firms during the stimulus period. Consequently, monetary stimulus crowded out private investment and decreased capital allocation efficiency.

Volume 78 Issue 1, February 2023 (11 Papers)

We examine decentralization of digital platforms through tokenization as an innovation to resolve the conflict between platforms and users. By delegating control to users, tokenization through utility tokens acts as a commitment device that prevents a platform from exploiting users. This commitment comes at the cost of not having an owner with an equity stake who, in conventional platforms, would subsidize participation to maximize the platform's network effect. This trade-off makes utility tokens a more appealing funding scheme than equity for platforms with weak fundamentals. The conflict reappears when nonusers, such as token investors and validators, participate on the platform.

We present a new approach for estimating small business equity returns. This approach applies the Merton (1974) credit model to the returns on entrepreneurial business credit card debt securitizations and solves for the implied equity returns for the small businesses owned by the cardholders. The estimated small business equity premium is 10.74%. The standard deviation of small business equity returns is 56.37%. We validate the methodology by applying it to investment-grade corporate bonds and recovering a public equity premium of 6.17%.

2022

Volume 77 Issue 6, December 2022 (9 Papers)

This paper studies China's recent exchange rate policy for the renminbi (RMB). We demonstrate empirically that a two-pillar policy is in place, aiming to balance exchange rate flexibility and RMB index stability via market and basket pillars. We further extend and validate the formulation that incorporates the so-called countercyclical factor. Theoretically, we develop a flexible-price monetary model for the RMB in which the two-pillar policy arises endogenously as an optimal response of the government. We estimate the model by generalized method of moments and quantitatively assess various policy trade-offs.

We study the influence of financial innovation by fintech brokerages on individual investors’ trading and stock prices. Using data from Robinhood, we find that Robinhood investors engage in more attention-induced trading than other retail investors. For example, Robinhood outages disproportionately reduce trading in high-attention stocks. While this evidence is consistent with Robinhood attracting relatively inexperienced investors, we show that it is also driven in part by the app's unique features. Consistent with models of attention-induced trading, intense buying by Robinhood users forecasts negative returns. Average 20-day abnormal returns are −4.7% for the top stocks purchased each day.

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.

Volume 77 Issue 5, October 2022 (10 Papers)

We examine how creditor protection affects firms with different levels of owners' and managers' personal costs of bankruptcy (PCB). Theoretically, we show that firms with high PCB borrow and invest more under a more debtor-friendly management stay system, whereas firms with low PCB borrow and invest more under a more creditor-friendly receivership system. Intuitively, stronger creditor protection relaxes financial constraints but reduces credit demand. Which effect dominates depends on owners' and managers' PCB. Empirically, we find support for these predictions using a Korean bankruptcy reform that replaced receivership with management stay.

We propose a model of sovereign debt in which countries vary in their level of financial development, defined as the extent to which they can issue debt denominated in domestic currency in international capital markets. We show that low levels of financial development generate the “debt intolerance” phenomenon that plagues emerging markets: it reduces overall debt capacity, increases credit spreads, and limits the country's ability to smooth consumption.

Institutions often own equity in multiple firms that compete in the same product market. Prior research has shown that these institutional “common owners” induce anticompetitive pricing behavior in the airline industry. This paper reevaluates this evidence and shows that the documented positive correlation between common ownership and airline ticket prices stems from the market share component of the common ownership measure, and not the ownership and control components. We further show that the results are sensitive to measures of investor control and to assumptions about equity holders' ownership and control during bankruptcy.

This paper explores the connection between rising intangible capital and the secular upward trend in U.S. corporate cash holdings. We calibrate a dynamic model with two productive assets—tangible and intangible capital—in which only tangible capital can serve as collateral. We highlight the following points: (i) a shift toward intangible capital shrinks firms' debt capacity and leads them to hold more cash, (ii) the effect accounts for three-quarters of the observed trend in average cash ratios, and (iii) it also accounts for the upward trend of cash ratios in the cross-section of small and large firms and in the aggregate.

The rewards received by financial managers depend on both relative performance (e.g., fund inflows based on fund rankings, promotions based on peer comparisons) and absolute performance (e.g., bonus payments for meeting accounting targets, hedge-fund incentive fees). Both relative and absolute performance rewards engender risk-taking. In this paper, we show that these two sources of risk-taking, relative and absolute performance rewards, mitigate the risk-taking incentives produced by the other. This mutual incentive-reduction effect generates a number of novel predictions about the relationship of managerial risk-taking with the structure of relative and absolute performance rewards.

Maintaining economic output during the COVID-19 pandemic results in benefits for firm shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leaning impacts this trade-off. We document that firms with a Republican-leaning CEO experience a relative increase in store visits compared to firms with a Democratic-leaning CEO. The increase in store visits is associated with higher sales and positive abnormal stock returns. However, we also document higher COVID-19 transmission rates and more employee safety complaints in communities where establishments with higher store traffic are managed by a Republican-leaning CEO.

Volume 77 Issue 4, August 2022 (11 Papers)

This paper uses surveys to document CFO perspectives on corporate planning, investment, capital structure, payout, and shareholder versus stakeholder focus. Comparing policy decisions today to those 20 years ago, I find that companies employ decision rules that are conservative, sticky, and geared to time the market; rely on internal forecasts that are miscalibrated and considered reliable only two years ahead; and emphasize corporate objectives that focus increasingly on stakeholders and revenues. These practice of corporate finance themes can discipline academic models toward better explaining outcomes. Models of satisficing decision-making or costly managerial biases align with many of the themes.

We examine the effect of pay transparency on the gender pay gap and firm outcomes. Using a 2006 legislation change in Denmark that requires firms to provide gender-disaggregated wage statistics, detailed employee-employer administrative data, and difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we find that the law reduces the gender pay gap, primarily by slowing wage growth for male employees. The gender pay gap declines by 2 percentage points, or 13% relative to the prelegislation mean. Despite the reduction of the overall wage bill, the wage transparency mandate does not affect firm profitability, likely because of the offsetting effect of reduced firm productivity.

We study the impact of debtor distress on support for a populist far-right political party during a financial crisis. Our empirical approach exploits variation in exposure to foreign currency household loans during a currency crisis in Hungary. Foreign currency debt exposure leads to a large, persistent increase in support for the populist far right. We document that the far right advocated for foreign currency debtors' interests by proposing aggressive debt relief and was rewarded with support from these voters. Our findings are consistent with theories emphasizing that conflict between creditors and debtors can shape political outcomes after financial crises.

Volume 77 Issue 3, June 2022 (10 Papers)

We investigate the effects of private equity firms on product markets using price and sales data for an extensive number of consumer products. Following a private equity deal, target firms increase retail sales of their products 50% more than matched control firms. Price increases—roughly 1% on existing products—do not drive this growth; the launch of new products and geographic expansion do. Competitors reduce their product offerings and marginally raise prices. Cross-sectional results on target firms, private equity firms, the economic environment, and product categories suggest that private equity generates growth by easing financial constraints and providing managerial expertise.

Robinhood investors increased their holdings in the March 2020 COVID bear market, indicating an absence of collective panic and margin calls. This steadfastness was rewarded in the subsequent bull market. Despite unusual interest in some “experience” stocks (e.g., cannabis stocks), they tilted primarily toward stocks with high past share volume and dollar-trading volume (themselves mostly big stocks). From mid-2018 to mid-2020, an aggregated crowd consensus portfolio (a proxy for the household-equal-weighted portfolio) had both good timing and good alpha.

We analyze how individuals reinvest realized capital gains and losses exploiting plausibly exogenous sales due to mutual fund liquidations. Individuals reinvest 83% if a forced sale results in a gain relative to the initial investment; but reinvest only 40% in the event of a loss. This difference is statistically significant for more than six months and arises because many individuals forced to realize a loss choose not to reinvest anything and some even exit the stock market altogether. Individuals treat realized losses differently from paper losses and are discouraged from investing more and participating in the stock market.

We study market dynamics when an owner learns about the quality of her asset over time. Since this information is private, the owner sells strategically to a less informed buyer following sufficient negative information. In response, market prices feature a “U-shape” and trading probabilities a “hump-shape” with respect to the time to sale. As the owner initially acquires greater information, buyers suffer greater adverse selection, and prices fall accordingly. Eventually, the probability of an informed sale shrinks, and prices rebound. We provide evidence consistent with our model in markets for residential real estate, venture capital investments, and construction equipment.

Short-term trade ideas are a component of analyst research highly valued by institutional investors. Using a novel and comprehensive database, we find that trade ideas have a stock price impact at least as large as recommendation and target price changes. Trade ideas based on expectations of future events are more informative than those identifying incomplete incorporation of past information in stock prices. Analysts with better access to a firm's management produce better trade ideas. Institutional investors trade in the direction of trade ideas. Investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns, consistent with analysts possessing valuable short-term stock-picking skills.

Volume 77 Issue 2, April 2022 (13 Papers)

Using historical data on postwar financial crises around the world, we show that the combination of rapid credit and asset price growth over the prior three years, whether in the nonfinancial business or the household sector, is associated with a 40% probability of entering a financial crisis within the next three years. This compares with a roughly 7% probability in normal times, when neither credit nor asset price growth is elevated. Our evidence challenges the view that financial crises are unpredictable “bolts from the sky” and supports the Kindleberger-Minsky view that crises are the byproduct of predictable, boom-bust credit cycles. This predictability favors policies that lean against incipient credit-market booms.

I find that returns are predictably negative for several months after the onset of recessions, becoming high only thereafter. I identify business cycle turning points by estimating a state-space model using macroeconomic data. Conditioning on the business cycle further reveals that returns exhibit momentum in recessions, whereas in expansions they display the mild reversals expected from discount rate changes. A strategy exploiting this pattern produces positive alphas. Using analyst forecast data, I show that my findings are consistent with investors' slow reaction to recessions. When expected returns are negative, analysts are too optimistic and their downward expectation revisions are exceptionally high.

We document large, longer term, joint regime shifts in asset valuations and the real federal funds rate- spread. To interpret these findings, we estimate a novel macrofinance model of monetary transmission and find that the documented regimes coincide with shifts in the parameters of a policy rule, with long-term consequences for the real interest rate. Estimates imply that two-thirds of the decline in the real interest rate since the early 1980s is attributable to regime changes in monetary policy. The model explains how infrequent changes in the stance of monetary policy can generate persistent changes in asset valuations and the equity premium.

We develop a new method to estimate Tobin's Qs of conglomerate divisions without relying on standalone firms. Divisional Qs differ considerably from those of standalone firms across industries, over time, and in their sensitivity to economic shocks. The differences are explained by intraconglomerate covariance structures and access to internal capital markets that mitigate external financing frictions. Consequently, the Qs capture variation in the allocation of assets in the economy: within firms through internal capital markets and across focused and diversified firms through diversifying acquisitions. Overall, our method provides opportunities to study the economic mechanisms that explain corporate diversification.

We find that three factors—cryptocurrency market, size, and momentum—capture the cross-sectional expected cryptocurrency returns. We consider a comprehensive list of price- and market-related return predictors in the stock market and construct their cryptocurrency counterparts. Ten cryptocurrency characteristics form successful long-short strategies that generate sizable and statistically significant excess returns, and we show that all of these strategies are accounted for by the cryptocurrency three-factor model. Lastly, we examine potential underlying mechanisms of the cryptocurrency size and momentum effects.

We examine equity markets’ reaction to the first-time disclosure of the CEO-worker pay ratio by U.S. public companies in 2018. We find that firms disclosing higher pay ratios experience significantly lower abnormal announcement returns. Firms whose shareholders are more inequality-averse experience a more negative market response to high pay ratios. Furthermore, during 2018 more inequality-averse investors rebalance their portfolios away from stocks with a high pay ratio relative to other investors. Our results suggest that equity markets are concerned about high within-firm pay dispersion, and investors’ inequality aversion is a channel through which high pay ratios negatively affect firm value.

Volume 77 Issue 1, February 2022 (15 Papers)

Innovations in statistical technology in functions including credit-screening have raised concerns about distributional impacts across categories such as race. Theoretically, distributional effects of better statistical technology can come from greater flexibility to uncover structural relationships or from triangulation of otherwise excluded characteristics. Using data on U.S. mortgages, we predict default using traditional and machine learning models. We find that Black and Hispanic borrowers are disproportionately less likely to gain from the introduction of machine learning. In a simple equilibrium credit market model, machine learning increases disparity in rates between and within groups, with these changes attributable primarily to greater flexibility.

Conventional wisdom suggests that labor market distress drives workers into temporary self-employment, lowering entrepreneurial quality. Analyzing employment histories for 640,000 U.S. workers, we document that graduating college during a period of high unemployment does increase entry to entrepreneurship. However, compared to voluntary entrepreneurs, firms founded by forced entrepreneurs are more likely to survive, innovate, and receive venture backing. Explaining these results, we confirm that labor shocks disproportionately impact high earners, with these workers starting more successful firms. Overall, we document untapped entrepreneurial potential across the top of the income distribution and the role of recessions in reversing this missing entrepreneurship.

A more positive cultural trust bias by an equity analyst's country of origin toward a firm's headquarter country is associated with significantly more positive stock recommendations. The cultural bias effect is stronger for eponymous firms whose names mention their home country and varies over time, increasing with negative sentiment. I find evidence of a negative North-South bias during the European debt crisis and United Kingdom-Europe divergence amid Brexit. Share price reactions to recommendations by more biased analysts are weaker, and more biased recommendations are worse predictors of monthly stock returns. More positively biased analysts also assign higher target prices.

This paper studies institutional investors’ incentives to be engaged shareholders. In 2017, the average institution gains an extra $129,000 in annual management fees if a stockholding increases 1% in value, considering both the direct effect on assets under management and the indirect effect on subsequent fund flows. The estimates range from $19,600 for investments in small firms to $307,600 for investments in large firms. Institutional shareholders in one firm often gain when the firm's competitors do well, by virtue of institutions’ holdings in those firms, but the impact of common ownership is modest in the most concentrated industries.

We present new data on female representation in the academic finance profession. In our sample of finance faculty at top-100 U.S. business schools during 2009 to 2017, only 16.0% are women. The gender imbalance manifests in several ways. First, after controlling for research productivity, women hold positions at lower ranked institutions and are less likely to be full professors. Results also suggest that they are paid less. Second, women publish fewer papers. This gender gap exists in research quantity, not quality. Third, women have more female coauthors, suggesting smaller publication networks. Time-series data suggest shrinking gender gaps in recent years.

I identify the effects of financial constraints on firms' product pricing decisions, using insurance groups containing both life and property & casualty (P&C) divisions. Following P&C divisions' losses, life divisions change prices in a manner that can generate more immediate financial resources: premiums fall (rise) for life policies that immediately increase (decrease) insurers' financial resources. Premiums change more in groups that are more constrained. Life divisions increase transfers to P&C divisions, suggesting P&C divisions' shocks are transmitted to life divisions. Results hold when instrumenting for P&C divisions' losses with exposure to unusual weather damages, implying that the effects are causal.

We propose a new measure of private information in decentralized markets—connections—which exploits the time variation in the number of dealers with whom a client trades in a time period. Using trade-level data for the U.K. government bond market, we show that clients perform better when having more connections as their trades predict future price movements. Time variation in market-wide connections also helps explain yield dynamics. Given our novel measure, we present two applications suggesting that (i) dealers pass on information, acquired from their informed clients, to their affiliates, and (ii) informed clients better predict the orderflow intermediated by their dealers.

2021

Volume 76 Issue 6, December 2021 (15 Papers)

Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts not affiliated with the U.S. president's party downward-adjust corporate credit ratings more frequently. Since we compare analysts with different party affiliations covering the same firm in the same quarter, differences in firm fundamentals cannot explain the results. We also find a sharp divergence in the rating actions of Democratic and Republican analysts around the 2016 presidential election. Our results show that analysts' partisan perception has price effects and may influence firms' investment policies.

Motivated by the recent rise of populism in Western democracies, we develop a tractable equilibrium model in which a populist backlash emerges endogenously in a strong economy. In the model, voters dislike inequality, especially the high consumption of “elites.” Economic growth exacerbates inequality due to heterogeneity in preferences , which leads to heterogeneity in returns on capital. In response to rising inequality, voters optimally elect a populist promising to end globalization. Equality is a luxury good. Countries with more inequality, higher financial development, and trade deficits are more vulnerable to populism, both in the model and in the data.

The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent at critical times. Using Swedish microdata, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a quasi-experiment, we confirm that financial distress drives these results: following a negative export shock caused by exogenous currency movements, talent abandons the firm, but only if the exporter is highly leveraged. Consistent with talent dependence being associated with higher labor costs of financial distress, firms that rely more on talent have more conservative capital structures.

Using U.S. household-level data and plausibly exogenous variation in the location-timing of home purchases with a single lender, I find that negative home equity causes a 2% to 6% reduction in household labor supply. Supporting causality, households are observationally equivalent at origination and equally sensitive to local housing shocks that do not cause negative equity. Results also hold comparing purchases within the same year-metropolitan statistical area that differ by only a few months. Though multiple channels are likely at work, evidence of nonlinear effects is broadly consistent with costs associated with housing lock and financial distress.

Volume 76 Issue 5, October 2021 (12 Papers)

We provide an easy method to identify marketable retail purchases and sales using recent, publicly available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 bps over the following week. Less than half of the predictive power of marketable retail order imbalance is attributable to order flow persistence, while the rest cannot be explained by contrarian trading (proxy for liquidity provision) or public news sentiment. There is suggestive, but only suggestive, evidence that retail marketable orders might contain firm-level information that is not yet incorporated into prices.

We hypothesize that investors partially think about stock price changes in dollar rather than percentage units, leading to more extreme return responses to news for lower-priced stocks. Consistent with such non-proportional thinking, we find a doubling in price is associated with a 20% to 30% decline in volatility and beta (controlling for size/liquidity). To identify a causal price effect, we show that volatility jumps following stock splits and drops following reverse splits. Lower-priced stocks also respond more strongly to firm-specific news. Non-proportional thinking helps explain asset pricing patterns such as the size-volatility/beta relation, the leverage effect puzzle, and return drift and reversals.

We estimate real losses arising from the cross-sectional misallocation of financial liabilities. Extending a production-based framework of misallocation measurement to the liabilities side of the balance sheet and using manufacturing firm data from the United States and China, we find significant misallocation of debt and equity in China but not the United States. Reallocating liabilities of firms in China to mimic U.S. efficiency would produce gains of 51% to 69% in real value-added, with only 17% to 21% stemming from inefficient debt-equity combinations. For Chinese firms that are large or in developed cities, we estimate lower distortionary financing costs.

We study the effect of a change in property rights on employee behavior in the financial advice industry. Our identification comes from staggered firm-level entry into the Protocol for Broker Recruiting, which waived nonsolicitation clauses for advisor transitions among member firms, effectively transferring ownership of client relationships from the firm to the advisor. After the shock, advisors appear to tend to client relationships more by investing in client-facing industry licenses, shifting to fee-based advising, and reducing customer complaints. Our findings support property rights based investment theories of the firm and document offsetting costs to restricting labor mobility.

Suppose that the 300+ published asset pricing factors are all spurious. How much p-hacking is required to produce these factors? If 10,000 researchers generate eight factors every day, it takes hundreds of years. This is because dozens of published t-statistics exceed 6.0, while the corresponding p-value is infinitesimal, implying an astronomical amount of p-hacking in a general model. More structure implies that p-hacking cannot address 100 published t-statistics that exceed 4.0, as they require an implausibly nonlinear preference for t-statistics or even more p-hacking. These results imply that mispricing, risk, and/or frictions have a key role in stock returns.

We examine the effects of physiology and spiritual sentiment on economic decision-making in the context of Ramadan 斋月, an entire lunar month of daily fasting and increased spiritual reflection in the Muslim faith. Using an administrative data set of bank loans originated in Turkey during 2003 to 2013, we find that small business loans originated during Ramadan are 15% more likely to default within two years of origination. Loans originated in hot Ramadans, when adverse physiological effects of fasting are greatest, and those approved by the busiest bank branches perform worse. Despite their worse performance, Ramadan loans have lower credit spreads.

We study mortgage design features aimed at stabilizing the macroeconomy. We model overlapping generations of borrowers and an infinitely lived risk-averse representative lender. Mortgages are priced using an equilibrium pricing kernel derived from the lender's endogenous consumption. We consider an adjustable-rate mortgage with an option that during recessions allows borrowers to pay only interest on their loan and extend its maturity. The option stabilizes consumption growth over the business cycle, shifts defaults to expansions, and enhances welfare. The cyclical properties of the contract are attractive to a risk-averse lender so that the mortgage can be provided at a relatively low cost.

Many cities have attracted a flurry of out-of-town (OOT) home buyers. Such capital inflows affect house prices, rents, construction, labor income, wealth, and ultimately welfare. We develop an equilibrium model to quantify the welfare effects of OOT home buyers for the typical U.S. metropolitan area. When OOT investors buy 10% of the housing in the city center and 5% in the suburbs, welfare among residents falls by 0.61% in consumption-equivalent units. House prices and rents rise substantially, resulting in welfare gains for owners and losses for renters. Policies that tax OOT buyers or mandate renting out vacant property mitigate welfare losses.

We present a new model of asset prices in which investors evaluate risk according to prospect theory and examine its ability to explain 23 prominent stock market anomalies. The model incorporates all of the elements of prospect theory, accounts for investors' prior gains and losses, and makes quantitative predictions about an asset's average return based on empirical estimates of the asset's return volatility, return skewness, and past capital gain. We find that the model can help explain a majority of the 23 anomalies.

Volume 76 Issue 4, August 2021 (11 Papers)

Based on a survey of American Finance Association members, we analyze how demographics, time allocation, production mechanisms, and institutional factors affect research production during the pandemic. Consistent with the literature, research productivity falls more for women and faculty with young children. Independently, and novel, extra time spent on teaching (much more likely for women) negatively affects research productivity. Also novel, concerns about feedback, isolation, and health have large negative research effects, which disproportionately affect junior faculty and PhD students. Finally, faculty who express greater concerns about employers’ finances report larger negative research effects and more concerns about feedback, isolation, and health.

We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. The problem is widespread, resulting in up to 31.4% of funds being misclassified with safer profiles, compared to their true, publicly reported holdings. “Misclassified funds”—those that hold risky bonds but claim to hold safer bonds—appear to on-average outperform lower risk funds in their peer groups. Within category groups, misclassified funds receive more Morningstar stars and higher investor flows. However, when we correctly classify them based on actual risk, these funds are mediocre performers.

Unexpectedly severe winter weather, which is arguably exogenous to firm and bank fundamentals, represents a significant cash flow shock for bank-borrowing firms. Firms respond to these shocks by drawing on and increasing the size of their credit lines. Banks charge borrowers for this liquidity via increased interest rates and less borrower-friendly loan provisions. Credit line adjustments occur within one calendar quarter of the shock and persist for at least nine months. Overall, we provide evidence that bank credit lines are an important tool for managing the nonfundamental component of cash flow volatility, especially for solvent, small bank borrowers.

Using 2,603 executive assessments, we study how CEO candidates differ from candidates for other top management positions, particularly CFOs. More than half of the variation in the 30 assessed characteristics is explained by four factors that we interpret as general ability, execution (vs. interpersonal), charisma (vs. analytical), and strategic (vs. managerial). CEO candidates have more extreme factor scores that differ significantly from those of CFO candidates. Conditional on being considered, candidates with greater general ability and interpersonal skills are more likely to be hired. These and our previous results on CEO success suggest that boards overweight interpersonal skills in hiring CEOs.

We study an at-scale natural experiment in which debit cards were given to cash transfer recipients who already had a bank account. Using administrative account data and household surveys, we find that beneficiaries accumulated a savings stock equal to 2% of annual income after two years with the card. The increase in formal savings represents an increase in overall savings, financed by a reduction in current consumption. There are two mechanisms. First, debit cards reduce transaction costs of accessing money. Second, they reduce monitoring costs, which led beneficiaries to check their account balances frequently and build trust in the bank.

Volume 76 Issue 3, June 2021 (11 Papers)

Using microdata from U.S. household surveys, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. This pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which constrain women's influence over intrahousehold financial decision-making. A randomized controlled experiment reveals that female identity hinders idea contribution by the wife. These findings underscore the roles of intrahousehold bargaining and traditional norms in shaping household financial decisions.

Using microdata from U.S. household surveys, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. This pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which constrain women's influence over intrahousehold financial decision-making. A randomized controlled experiment reveals that female identity hinders idea contribution by the wife. These findings underscore the roles of intrahousehold bargaining and traditional norms in shaping household financial decisions.

Volume 76 Issue 2, April 2021 (12 Papers)

Using high-frequency, granular panel data on short-term debt securities issued in Europe, we study the existence, empirical boundaries, and fragility of private assets' safety. We show that only securities with the shortest maturities, issued by banks (certificates of deposit, or CDs), benefit from a safety premium. The supply of such CDs responds positively to excess safety demand. During periods of stress, this relation vanishes for all issuers of private securities, even though their aggregate volumes do not collapse. Other dimensions of heterogeneity, including issuers' balance sheets or their domicile countries' fiscal capacity, are less relevant for private safety.

A common view of retail finance is that conflicts of interest contribute to the high cost of advice. Within a large sample of Canadian financial advisors and their clients, however, we show that advisors typically invest personally just as they advise their clients. Advisors trade frequently, chase returns, prefer expensive and actively managed funds, and underdiversify. Advisors' net returns of −3% per year are similar to their clients' net returns. Advisors do not strategically hold expensive portfolios only to convince clients to do the same; they continue to do so after they leave the industry.

In this paper, I explore a reform at the Oslo Stock Exchange to assess the causal effect of posttrade trader anonymity on stock liquidity and trading volume. Using a regression discontinuity approach, I find that anonymity leads to a reduction in bid-ask spreads of 40% and an increase in trading volume of more than 50%. The increase in trading volume is accounted for largely by increased trading activity by institutional investors, while retail investors do not adjust their trading behavior in response to anonymity. The results suggest that posttrade anonymity positively affects standard measures of market quality.

How do investors perceive dependence between stock returns; and how does their perception of dependence affect investments and stock prices? We show experimentally that investors understand differences in dependence, but not in terms of correlation. Participants invest as if applying a simple counting heuristic for the frequency of comovement. They diversify more when the frequency of comovement is lower even if correlation is higher due to dependence in the tails. Building on our experimental findings, we empirically analyze U.S. stock returns. We identify a robust return premium for stocks with high frequencies of comovement with the market return.

We analyze how boards' reputational concerns influence executive compensation and the use of hidden pay. Independent boards reduce disclosed pay to signal their independence, but are more likely than manager-friendly boards to use hidden pay or to distort incentive contracts. Stronger reputational pressures lead to lower disclosed pay, weaker managerial incentives, and higher hidden pay, whereas greater transparency of executive compensation has the opposite effects. Although reputational concerns can induce boards to choose compensation contracts more favorable to shareholders, we show that there is a threshold beyond which stronger reputational concerns harm shareholders. Similarly, excessive pay transparency can harm shareholders.

Volume 76 Issue 1, February 2021 (10 Papers)

We study how parent liability for subsidiaries' environmental cleanup costs affects industrial pollution and production. Our empirical setting exploits a Supreme Court decision that strengthened parent limited liability protection for some subsidiaries. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that stronger liability protection for parents leads to a 5% to 9% increase in toxic emissions by subsidiaries. Evidence suggests the increase in pollution is driven by lower investment in abatement technologies rather than increased production. Cross-sectional tests suggest convexities associated with insolvency and executive compensation drive heterogeneous effects. Overall, our findings highlight the moral hazard problem associated with limited liability.

We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and in turn economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis but were employed at the same firm and lived in the same metropolitan area. We find that, following a negative wealth shock, innovative workers become less productive and generate lower economic value for their firms. The reduction in innovative output is not driven by workers switching to less innovative firms or positions. These effects are more pronounced among workers at greater risk of financial distress.

Using loan-level data on millions of used-car transactions across hundreds of lenders, we study the consumer response to exogenous variation in credit terms. Borrowers offered shorter maturity decrease expenditures enough to offset 60% to 90% of the monthly payment increase. Most of this is driven by shifting toward lower-quality cars, but affected borrowers offset 20% to 30% of a monthly payment shock by negotiating lower prices for equivalent cars. Our results suggest that durable goods prices adjust to reflect credit terms even at the individual level, with one year of additional loan maturity increasing a car's price by 2.8%.

We develop a model in which customer capital depends on key talents' contribution and pure brand recognition. Customer capital guarantees stable demand but is fragile to financial constraints risk if retained mainly by talents, who tend to quit financially constrained firms, damaging customer capital. Using a proprietary, granular brand-perception survey, we construct a firm-level measure of the inalienability of customer capital (ICC) that captures the degree to which customer capital depends on talents. Firms with higher ICC have higher average returns, higher talent turnover, and more precautionary financial policies. The ICC-sorted long-short portfolio's spread comoves with financial constraints factor.

We show that aversion to risk and ambiguity leads to information inertia when investors process public news about assets. Optimal portfolios do not always depend on news that is worse than expected; hence, the equilibrium stock price does not reflect this bad news. This informational inefficiency is more severe when there is more risk and ambiguity but disappears when investors are risk-neutral or the news is about idiosyncratic risk. Information inertia leads to news momentum (e.g., after earnings announcements) and is consistent with low household trading activity. An ambiguity premium helps explain the macro and earnings announcement premium.

2020

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2020 (9 Papers)

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built data set for Chinese local public debt. Private firms invest less in cities with more public debt, with the reduction in investment larger for firms located farther from banks in other cities or more dependent on external funding. Moreover, in cities where public debt is high, private firms' investment is more sensitive to internal cash flow.

We analyze credit rating effects on firm investments in a rational bond financing game that features a feedback loop. The credit rating agency (CRA) inflates the rating, providing a biased but informative signal to creditors. Creditors' response to the rating affects the firm's investment decision and thus its credit quality, which is reflected in the rating. The CRA might reduce ex ante economic efficiency, which results solely from its strategic effect: the CRA assigns more firms high ratings and allows them to gamble for resurrection. We derive empirical predictions on the determinants of rating standards and inflation and discuss policy implications.

We study the impact of Quickpay, a reform that permanently accelerated payments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong direct effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm level. However, we document substantial crowding out of nontreated firms' employment within local labor markets. While the overall net employment effect is positive, it is close to zero in tight labor markets. Our results highlight an important channel for alleviating financing constraints in small firms, but emphasize the general-equilibrium effects of large-scale interventions, which can lead to lower aggregate outcomes depending on labor market conditions.

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2020 (12 Papers)

We study how employment documentation requirements and out-of-pocket closing costs constrain mortgage refinancing. These frictions, which bind most severely during recessions, may significantly inhibit monetary policy pass-through. To study their effects on refinancing, we exploit a Federal Housing Administration policy change that excluded unemployed borrowers from refinancing and increased others' out-of-pocket costs substantially. These changes dramatically reduced refinancing rates, particularly among the likely unemployed and those facing new out-of-pocket costs. Our results imply that unemployed and liquidity-constrained borrowers have a high latent demand for refinancing. Cyclical variation in these factors may therefore affect both the aggregate and distributional consequences of monetary policy.

We study the financial and labor market impacts of bad credit reports. Using difference-in-differences variation from the staggered removal of bankruptcy flags, we show that bankruptcy flag removal leads to economically large increases in credit limits and borrowing. Using administrative tax records linked to personal bankruptcy records, we estimate economically small effects of flag removal on employment and earnings outcomes. We rationalize these contrasting results by showing that, conditional on basic observables, “hidden” bankruptcy flags are strongly correlated with adverse credit market outcomes but have no predictive power for measures of job performance.

Multiple testing plagues many important questions in finance such as fund and factor selection. We propose a new way to calibrate both Type I and Type II errors. Next, using a double-bootstrap method, we establish a t-statistic hurdle that is associated with a specific false discovery rate (e.g., 5%). We also establish a hurdle that is associated with a certain acceptable ratio of misses to false discoveries (Type II error scaled by Type I error), which effectively allows for differential costs of the two types of mistakes. Evaluating current methods, we find that they lack power to detect outperforming managers.

We study the effects of anti-takeover provisions (ATPs) on the takeover probability, the takeover premium, and target selection. Voting to remove an ATP increases both the takeover probability and the takeover premium, that is, there is no evidence of a trade-off between premiums and takeover probabilities. We provide causal estimates based on shareholder proposals to remove ATPs and address the endogenous selection of targets through bounding techniques. The positive premium effect in less protected firms is driven by better bidder-target matching and merger synergies.

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2020 (12 Papers)

I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance—the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is social transmission bias: systematic directional shift in signals or ideas induced by social transactions. I use five “fables” (models) to illustrate the novelty and scope of the transmission bias approach, and offer several emergent themes. For example, social transmission bias compounds recursively, which can help explain booms, bubbles, return anomalies, and swings in economic sentiment.

We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most pronounced among corporate insiders with recent direct connections. Notably, we find evidence of abnormal trading by politically connected insiders 30 days in advance of TARP infusions, and that these trades anticipate the market reaction to the infusion. Our results suggest that political connections can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders.

Using variation in firms’ exposure to their CEOs resulting from hospitalization, we estimate the effect of chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm policies, holding firm-CEO matches constant. We document three main findings. First, CEOs have a significant effect on profitability and investment. Second, CEO effects are larger for younger CEOs, in growing and family-controlled firms, and in human-capital-intensive industries. Third, CEOs are unique: the hospitalization of other senior executives does not have similar effects on the performance. Overall, our findings demonstrate that CEOs are a key driver of firm performance, which suggests that CEO contingency plans are valuable.

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar, influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom. Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month-ends. Rather than demand from cash investors, these patterns are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis of unbacked digital money inflating cryptocurrency prices.

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar, influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom. Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month-ends. Rather than demand from cash investors, these patterns are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis of unbacked digital money inflating cryptocurrency prices.

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2020 (13 Papers)

We study corporate control tracing controlling shareholders for thousands of listed firms from 127 countries over 2004 to 2012. Government and family control is pervasive in civil-law countries. Blocks are commonplace, but less so in common-law countries. These patterns apply to large, medium, and small firms. In contrast, the development-control nexus is heterogeneous; strong for large but absent for small firms. Control correlates strongly with shareholder protection, the stringency of employment contracts and unions power. Conversely, the correlations with creditor rights, legal formalism, and entry regulation appear weak. These patterns support both legal origin and political theories of financial development.

Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations, we show that changes to the language and construction of financial reports have strong implications for firms’ future returns and operations. A portfolio that shorts “changers” and buys “nonchangers” earns up to 188 basis points per month in alpha (over 22% per year) in the future. Moreover, changes to 10-Ks predict future earnings, profitability, future news announcements, and even future firm-level bankruptcies. Unlike typical underreaction patterns, we find no announcement effect, suggesting that investors are inattentive to these simple changes across the universe of public firms.

The majority of security analysts are identified as skilled when the cross-section of analyst performance is modeled as a mixture of multiple skill distributions. Analysts exhibit heterogeneous skill—some are high-type, and some are low-type. On average, the recommendation revisions of both types exhibit positive abnormal returns. The heterogeneity stems from differential ability to produce new information; all analysts can profitably process news. Top analysts outperform because more of their recommendations are influential (i.e., associated with statistically significant returns) and both their influential and noninfluential recommendations are more informative. A majority of research firms are also identified as skilled.

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2020 (12 Papers)

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from venture capitalists, banks, and public investors.

In this paper, we study the impact of noise traders’ limited attention on financial markets. Specifically, we exploit episodes of sensational news (exogenous to the market) that distract noise traders. We find that on “distraction days,” trading activity, liquidity, and volatility decrease, and prices reverse less among stocks owned predominantly by noise traders. These outcomes contrast sharply with those due to the inattention of informed speculators and market makers, and are consistent with noise traders mitigating adverse selection risk. We discuss the evolution of these outcomes over time and the role of technological changes.

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2020 (12 Papers)

For years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accidentally distributed securities disclosures to some investors before the public. We exploit this setting, which is unique because the delay until public disclosure was exogenous and the private information window was well defined, to study informed trading with a random stopping time. Trading intensity and the pace at which prices incorporate information decrease with the expected delay until public release, but the relation between trading intensity and time elapsed varies with traders' learning process. Noise trading and relative information advantage play similar roles as in standard microstructure theories assuming a fixed time window.

Information and control rights are central aspects of leadership, management, and corporate governance. This paper studies a principal-agent model that features both communication and intervention as alternative means to exert influence. The main result shows that a principal's power to intervene in an agent's decision limits the ability of the principal to effectively communicate her private information. The perverse effect of intervention on communication can harm the principal, especially when the cost of intervention is low or the underlying agency problem is severe. These novel results are applied to managerial leadership, corporate boards, private equity, and shareholder activism.

Using unique data on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we examine the influence of networks on investment decisions. Comparing employees within a firm during the same election window with metro area fixed effects, we find that the choices of coworkers in the firm's ESPP exert a significant influence on employees’ own decisions to participate and trade. Moreover, we find that the presence of high-information employees magnifies the effects of peer networks. Given participation in an ESPP is value-maximizing, our analysis suggests the potential of networks and targeted investor education to improve financial decision-making.

We study sources of investor disagreement using sentiment of investors from a social media investing platform, combined with information on the users' investment approaches (e.g., technical, fundamental). We examine how much of overall disagreement is driven by different information sets versus differential interpretation of information by studying disagreement within and across investment approaches. Overall disagreement is evenly split between both sources of disagreement, but within-group disagreement is more tightly related to trading volume than cross-group disagreement. Although both sources of disagreement are important, our findings suggest that information differences are more important for trading than differences across market approaches.

We test whether the display of information causally affects investor behavior in a high-stakes trading environment. Using investor-level brokerage data from China and a natural experiment, we estimate the impact of a shock that increased the salience of a stock's purchase price but did not change the investor's information set. We employ a difference-in-differences approach and find that the salience shock causally increased the disposition effect by 17%. We use microdata to document substantial heterogeneity across investors in the treatment effect. A previously documented trading pattern, the “rank effect,” explains heterogeneity in the change in the disposition effect.

2019

Volume 74 Issue 6, December 2019 (13 Papers)

How does information get revealed in decentralized markets? We test several hypotheses inspired by recent dealer-network theory. To do so, we construct an empirical map of information revelation where two dealers are connected based on the synchronicity of their quote changes. The tests, based on the euro to Swiss franc spot rate (EUR/CHF) quote data including the 2015 crash, largely support theory: strongly connected (i.e., central) dealers are more informed. Connections are weaker when there is less to be learned. The crash serves to identify how a network forms when dealers are transitioned from no-learning to learning, that is, from a fixed to a floating rate.

Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the U.S. mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability: being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high sustainability led to net inflows of more than $24 billion. Experimental evidence suggests that sustainability is viewed as positively predicting future performance, but we do not find evidence that high-sustainability funds outperform low-sustainability funds. The evidence is consistent with positive affect influencing expectations of sustainable fund performance and nonpecuniary motives influencing investment decisions.

In one of the greatest extensions of property rights in human history, common law countries began giving rights to married women in the 1850s. Before this “women's liberation,” the doctrine of coverture strongly incentivized parents of daughters to hold real estate, rather than financial assets such as money, stocks, or bonds. We exploit the staggered nature of coverture's demise across U.S. states to show that women's rights led to shifts in household portfolios, a positive shock to the supply of credit, and a reallocation of labor toward nonagriculture and capital-intensive industries. Investor protection thus deepened financial markets, aiding industrialization.

We study the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on life-cycle behavior. With new survey evidence, we document that survival is underestimated (overestimated) by the young (old). We calibrate a canonical life-cycle model to elicited beliefs. Relative to calibrations using actuarial probabilities, the young undersave by 26%, and retirees draw down their assets 27% slower, while the model's fit to consumption data improves by 88%. Cross-sectional regressions support the model's predictions: Distorted mortality beliefs correlate with savings behavior while controlling for risk preferences, cognitive, and socioeconomic factors. Overweighting the likelihood of rare events contributes to mortality belief distortions.

Volume 74 Issue 5, October 2019 (11 Papers)

Many individual investors, mutual funds, and institutions trade as if dividends and capital gains are disconnected attributes, not fully appreciating that dividends result in price decreases. Behavioral trading patterns (e.g., the disposition effect) are driven by price changes instead of total returns. Investors rarely reinvest dividends, and trade as if dividends are a separate, stable income stream. Analysts fail to account for the effect of dividends on price, leading to optimistic price forecasts for dividend-paying stocks. Demand for dividends is systematically higher in periods of low interest rates and poor market performance, leading to lower returns for dividend-paying stocks.

A unique data set from a large Ponzi scheme allows me to study word-of-mouth diffusion of investment information. Investors could join the scheme only by invitation from an existing member, which allows me to observe how the idea spreads from one person to the next based on inviter-invitee relationships. I find that the observed social network has a scale-free connectivity structure, which significantly facilitates the diffusion of the investment idea and contributes to the growth and survival of the socially spreading Ponzi scheme. I further find that investors invest more if their inviter has comparatively higher age, education, and income.

We analyze how proxy advisors, which sell voting recommendations to shareholders, affect corporate decision-making. If the quality of the advisor's information is low, there is overreliance on its recommendations and insufficient private information production. In contrast, if the advisor's information is precise, it may be underused because the advisor rations its recommendations to maximize profits. Overall, the advisor's presence leads to more informative voting only if its information is sufficiently precise. We evaluate several proposals on regulating proxy advisors and show that some suggested policies, such as reducing proxy advisors' market power or decreasing litigation pressure, can have negative effects.

Using novel survey data, we document that individuals extrapolate from recent personal experiences when forming expectations about aggregate economic outcomes. Recent locally experienced house price movements affect expectations about future U.S. house price changes and higher experienced house price volatility causes respondents to report a wider distribution over expected U.S. house price movements. When we exploit within-individual variation in employment status, we find that individuals who personally experience unemployment become more pessimistic about future nationwide unemployment. The extent of extrapolation is unrelated to how informative personal experiences are, is inconsistent with risk adjustment, and is more pronounced for less sophisticated individuals.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits of international diversification via developed markets have declined dramatically. While emerging markets still offer diversification opportunities, their public equity indices capture only a fraction of emerging countries' economic activity. We propose a diversification approach that exploits the global connectedness of developed countries to gain exposure to emerging countries' overall economies rather than their shallow equity markets. In doing so, we demonstrate that developed markets still offer substantial diversification benefits beyond those available through equity indices. Our results suggest that relying on equity indices to assess diversification benefits understates diversification gains.

Volume 74 Issue 4, August 2019 (12 Papers)

Optimal dynamic capital structure choice is fundamentally a problem of commitment. In a standard trade-off setting with shareholder-debtholder agency conflicts, full commitment counterfactually predicts the firm would rely almost exclusively on debt financing. Conversely, absent commitment a Modigliani-Miller-like value irrelevance and policy indeterminacy result holds. Thus, the content of dynamic trade-off theory must depend on the commitment technology. In this context, collateral is valuable as a low-cost commitment device. Because ex ante optimal commitments are likely to be suboptimal ex post, observed capital structure dynamics will exhibit hysteresis and depart significantly from standard predictions.

We analyze the contribution to price discovery of market and limit orders by high-frequency traders (HFTs) and non-HFTs. While market orders have a larger individual price impact, limit orders are far more numerous. This results in price discovery occurring predominantly through limit orders. HFTs submit the bulk of limit orders and these limit orders provide most of the price discovery. Submissions of limit orders and their contribution to price discovery fall with volatility due to changes in HFTs’ behavior. Consistent with adverse selection arising from faster reactions to public information, HFTs’ informational advantage is partially explained by public information.

This paper studies the asset pricing implications of a firm's opportunities to replace routine-task labor with automation. I develop a model in which firms optimally undertake such replacement when their productivity is low. Hence, firms with routine-task labor maintain a replacement option that hedges their value against unfavorable macroeconomic shocks and lowers their expected returns. Using establishment-level occupational data, I construct a measure of firms' share of routine-task labor. Compared to their industry peers, firms with a higher share of routine-task labor (i) invest more in machines and reduce more routine-task labor during economic downturns, and (ii) have lower expected stock returns.

This paper studies optimal contracts when managers manipulate their performance measure at the expense of firm value. Optimal contracts defer compensation. The manager's incentives vest over time at an increasing rate, and compensation becomes very sensitive to short-term performance. This generates an endogenous horizon problem whereby managers intensify performance manipulation in their final years in office. Contracts are designed to encourage effort while minimizing the adverse effects of manipulation. We characterize the optimal mix of short- and long-term compensation along the manager's tenure, the optimal vesting period of incentive pay, and the dynamics of short-termism over the CEO's tenure.

Volume 74 Issue 3, June 2019 (10 Papers)

We develop an empirical model of employee stock option exercise that is suitable for valuation and allows for behavioral channels. We estimate exercise rates as functions of option, stock, and employee characteristics using all employee exercises at 88 public firms, 27 of them in the S&P 500. Increasing vesting frequency from annual to monthly reduces option value by 11% to 16%. Men exercise faster, reducing value by 2% to 4%, while top employees exercise slower, increasing value by 2% to 7%. Finally, we develop an analytic valuation approximation that is more accurate than methods used in practice.

I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond data set, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive otherwise-identical bonds coexist in the market. Brokers are incentivized to sell the dominated bonds, typically earning two times greater fees for selling them. I develop and estimate a broker-intermediated search model that rationalizes this behavior. The estimates indicate that costly search is a key friction in financial markets, but the effects of search costs are compounded when brokers are incentivized to direct the search of consumers toward high-fee inferior products.

I show that venture capitalists' motivation to build reputation can have beneficial effects in the primary market, mitigating information frictions and helping firms go public. Because uninformed reputation-motivated venture capitalists want to appear informed, they are biased against backing firms—by not backing firms, they avoid taking low-value firms to market, which would ultimately reveal their lack of information. In equilibrium, reputation-motivated venture capitalists back relatively few bad firms, creating a certification effect that mitigates information frictions. However, they also back relatively few good firms, and thus, reputation motivation decreases welfare when good firms are abundant or profitable.

Volume 74 Issue 2, April 2019 (12 Papers)

Exploiting a unique institutional setting in Korea, this paper documents that politicians can increase the amount of government resources allocated through their social networks to the benefit of private firms connected to these networks. After winning the election, the new president appoints members of his networks as CEOs of state-owned firms that act as intermediaries in allocating government contracts to private firms. In turn, these state firms allocate significantly more procurement contracts to private firms with a CEO from the same network. Contracts allocated to connected private firms are executed systematically worse and exhibit more frequent cost increases through renegotiations.

Using both investor- and stock-level data, I examine the relation between stockholders’ unrealized returns since purchase and the market response to earnings announcements. I demonstrate that stockholders’ unrealized gain/loss position moderates their trading behavior in response to earnings announcements. I also find that this behavior generates a short-window return underreaction to earnings news. My results are generally consistent with predictions from prospect theory regarding the manner in which stockholders’ unrealized returns moderate their trading response to belief shocks. However, my results also suggest that an emotional component (i.e., regret-avoidance/pride-seeking) is necessary to explain the observed investor behavior.

Event studies of market efficiency measure earnings surprises using the consensus error (CE), given as actual earnings minus the average professional forecast. If a subset of forecasts can be biased, the ideal but difficult to estimate parameter-dependent alternative to CE is a nonlinear filter of individual errors that adjusts for bias. We show that CE is a poor parameter-free approximation of this ideal measure. The fraction of misses on the same side (FOM), which discards the magnitude of misses, offers a far better approximation. FOM performs particularly well against CE in predicting the returns of U.S. stocks, where bias is potentially large.

Recent work suggests that sentiment traders shift from safer to more speculative stocks when sentiment increases. Exploiting these cross-sectional patterns and changes in share ownership, we find that sentiment metrics capture institutional rather than individual investors’ demand shocks. We investigate the underlying economic mechanisms and find that common institutional investment styles (e.g., risk management, momentum trading) explain a significant portion of the relation between institutions and sentiment.

Despite their mediocre mean performance, actively managed mutual funds are distinct from passive funds in their return distributions. Active value funds better hedge downside risk, while active growth funds better capture upside potential. Since such performance features may appeal to investors with tail-overweighting preferences, we show that preferences for downside protection and upside potential estimated from the empirical pricing kernel can help explain active fund flows in the value and growth categories, respectively. This effect of investor risk preferences varies significantly with funds' downside-hedging and upside-capturing ability, with levels of active management, and across retirement and retail funds.

Volume 74 Issue 1, February 2019 (12 Papers)

This paper investigates the consequences of liquidation and reorganization on the allocation and subsequent utilization of assets in bankruptcy. Using the random assignment of judges to bankruptcy cases as a natural experiment that forces some firms into liquidation, we find that the long-run utilization of assets of liquidated firms is lower relative to assets of reorganized firms. These effects are concentrated in thin markets with few potential users and in areas with low access to finance. These findings suggest that when search frictions are large, liquidation can lead to inefficient allocation of assets in bankruptcy.

Dealers in the over-the-counter municipal bond market form trading networks with other dealers to mitigate search frictions. Regulatory data show that this network has a core-periphery structure with 10 to 30 hubs and over 2,000 peripheral broker-dealers in which bonds flow from periphery to core and partially back. Central dealers charge investors up to double the round-trip markups compared to peripheral dealers. In turn, central dealers provide immediacy by matching buyers with sellers more directly and prearranging fewer trades, especially during stress times. Investors thus face a trade-off between execution cost and speed, consistent with network models of decentralized trade.

We present a latent variable model of dividends that predicts, out-of-sample, 39.5% to 41.3% of the variation in annual dividend growth rates between 1975 and 2016. Further, when learning about dividend dynamics is incorporated into a long-run risks model, the model predicts, out-of-sample, 25.3% to 27.1% of the variation in annual stock index returns over the same time horizon, with learning contributing approximately half of the predictability in returns. These findings support the view that investors' aversion to long-run risks and their learning about these risks are important in determining stock index prices and expected returns.

We present a latent variable model of dividends that predicts, out-of-sample, 39.5% to 41.3% of the variation in annual dividend growth rates between 1975 and 2016. Further, when learning about dividend dynamics is incorporated into a long-run risks model, the model predicts, out-of-sample, 25.3% to 27.1% of the variation in annual stock index returns over the same time horizon, with learning contributing approximately half of the predictability in returns. These findings support the view that investors' aversion to long-run risks and their learning about these risks are important in determining stock index prices and expected returns.

2018

Volume 73 Issue 6, December 2018 (15 Papers)

When unscheduled news arrives, investors react with a stochastic delay yet still may exploit new information. In this context, I study the equilibrium dynamics of limit order markets. Continuous idiosyncratic liquidity shocks result in trades on both sides of the order book. News therefore arrives at random times. Following news, order flows become unbalanced and market depth is consumed, leading to positive covariance between price variability, trading volume, and order book unbalances. Holding the unconditional price variability constant, news frequency has a negative effect on both market depth and the variability-volume covariance.

Volume 73 Issue 5, October 2018 (12 Papers)

We study whether R&D-intensive firms are more resilient to trade shocks. We correct for the endogeneity of R&D using tax-induced changes to R&D costs. While rising imports from China lead to slower sales growth and lower profitability, these effects are significantly smaller for firms with a larger stock of R&D (about half when moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile of R&D). We provide evidence that this effect is explained by R&D allowing firms to increase product differentiation. As a result, while firms in import-competing industries cut capital expenditures and employment, R&D-intensive firms downsize considerably less.

Financial misconduct (FM) rates differ widely between major U.S. cities, up to a factor of 3. Although spatial differences in enforcement and firm characteristics do not account for these patterns, city-level norms appear to be very important. For example, FM rates are strongly related to other unethical behavior, involving politicians, doctors, and (potentially unfaithful) spouses, in the city.

We find that the number of independent directors on corporate boards increases by approximately 24% following financial covenant violations in credit agreements. Most of these new directors have links to creditors. Firms that appoint new directors after violations are more likely to issue new equity, and to decrease payout, operational risk, and CEO cash compensation, than firms without such appointments. We conclude that a firm's board composition, governance, and policies are shaped by current and past credit agreements.

Volume 73 Issue 4, August 2018 (11 Papers)

Many natural competitors are jointly held by a small set of large institutional investors. In the U.S. airline industry, taking common ownership into account implies increases in market concentration that are 10 times larger than what is “presumed likely to enhance market power” by antitrust authorities.1 Within-route changes in common ownership concentration robustly correlate with route-level changes in ticket prices, even when we only use variation in ownership due to the combination of two large asset managers. We conclude that a hidden social cost—reduced product market competition—accompanies the private benefits of diversification and good governance.

For years, online retailers have maintained a price advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers by not collecting sales tax at the time of sale. Recently, several states have required that online retailer Amazon collect sales tax during checkout. Using transaction-level data, we document that households living in these states reduced their Amazon purchases by 9.4% following the implementation of the sales tax laws, implying elasticities of –1.2 to –1.4. The effect is stronger for large purchases, where purchases declined by 29.1%, corresponding to an elasticity of –3.9. Studying competitors in the electronics field, we find some evidence of substitution toward competing retailers.

Volume 73 Issue 3, June 2018 (12 Papers)

Because uncertainty is high in bad times, investors find it harder to assess firm prospects and hence should value analyst output more. However, higher uncertainty makes analysts’ tasks harder, so it is unclear whether analyst output is more valuable in bad times. We find that in bad times, analyst revisions have a larger stock-price impact, earnings forecast errors per unit of uncertainty fall, and analyst reports are more frequent and longer. The increased impact of analysts is also more pronounced for harder-to-value firms. These results are consistent with analysts working harder and investors relying more on analysts in bad times.

Using laboratory experiments, we provide evidence on three factors influencing trader performance: fluid intelligence, cognitive reflection, and theory of mind (ToM). Fluid intelligence provides traders with computational skills necessary to draw a statistical inference. Cognitive reflection helps traders avoid behavioral biases and thereby extract signals from market orders and update their prior beliefs accordingly. ToM describes the degree to which traders correctly assess the informational content of orders. We show that cognitive reflection and ToM are complementary because traders benefit from understanding signals’ quality only if they are capable of processing these signals.

Theory suggests that financing frictions can have significant implications for equity volatility by shaping firms’ exposure to economic risks. This paper provides evidence that an important determinant of higher equity volatility among research and development (R&D)-intensive firms is fewer financing constraints on firms’ ability to access growth options. I provide evidence for this effect by studying how persistent shocks to the value of firms’ tangible assets (real estate) affect their subsequent equity volatility. The analysis addresses concerns about the identification of these balance sheet effects and shows that these effects are consistent with broader patterns on the equity volatility of R&D-intensive firms.

We develop a dynamic model of belief dispersion with a continuum of investors differing in beliefs. The model is tractable and qualitatively matches many of the empirical regularities in a stock price and its mean return, volatility, and trading volume. We find that the stock price is convex in cash-flow news and increases in belief dispersion, while its mean return decreases when the view on the stock is optimistic, and vice versa when pessimistic. Moreover, belief dispersion leads to higher stock volatility and trading volume. We demonstrate that otherwise identical two-investor heterogeneous-beliefs economies do not necessarily generate our main results.

Using a novel data set of U.S. financial advisors that includes individuals' employment histories and misconduct records, we show that coworkers influence an individual's propensity to commit financial misconduct. We identify coworkers' effect on misconduct using changes in coworkers caused by mergers of financial advisory firms. The tests include merger-firm fixed effects to exploit the variation in changes to coworkers across branches of the same firm. The probability of an advisor committing misconduct increases if his new coworkers, encountered in the merger, have a history of misconduct. This effect is stronger between demographically similar coworkers.

Volume 73 Issue 2, April 2018 (10 Papers)

We argue and demonstrate empirically that a firm's institutional and legal context has first-order effects in tests that use state antitakeover laws for identification. A priori, the size and direction of a law's effect on a firm's takeover protection depends on (i) other state antitakeover laws, (ii) preexisting firm-level takeover defenses, and (iii) the legal regime as reflected by important court decisions. In addition, (iv) state antitakeover laws are not exogenous for many easily identifiable firms. We show that the inferences from nine prior studies related to nine different outcome variables change substantially when we include controls for these considerations.

We match administrative panel data on portfolio choices with survey measures of financial literacy. When we control for portfolio risk, the most literate households experience 0.4% higher annual returns than the least literate households. Distinct portfolio dynamics are the key determinant of this difference. More literate households hold riskier positions when expected returns are higher, they more actively rebalance their portfolios and do so in a way that holds their risk exposure relatively constant over time, and they are more likely to buy assets that provide higher returns than the assets that they sell.

Volume 73 Issue 1, February 2018 (10 Papers)

I identify the effects of personal relationships on loan contracting using executive deaths and retirements at other firms as a source of exogenous variation in executive turnover. After plausibly exogenous turnover, borrowers choose lenders with which their new executives have personal relationships 4.1 times as frequently, and loans from these lenders have 20 basis points lower spreads and 12.5% larger amounts. Personal relationships benefit firms across loan terms, especially during macroeconomic downturns. Increased financial flexibility from personal relationships insulated firms from financial shocks during the recent financial crisis: they exhibited less constrained investment and were less likely to layoff employees.

Using proprietary data from the China Development Bank (CDB), this paper examines the effects of government credit on firm activities. Tracing the effects of government credit across different levels of the supply chain, I find that CDB industrial loans to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) crowd out private firms in the same industry but crowd in private firms in downstream industries. On average, a $1 increase in CDB SOE loans leads to a $0.20 decrease in private firms' assets. Moreover, CDB infrastructure loans crowd in private firms. I use exogenous timing of municipal politicians' turnover as an instrument for CDB credit flows.

We study managerial incentive provision under moral hazard when growth opportunities arrive stochastically and pursuing them requires a change in management. A trade-off arises between the benefit of always having the “right” manager and the cost of incentive provision. The prospect of growth-induced turnover limits the firm's ability to rely on deferred pay, resulting in more front-loaded compensation. The optimal contract may insulate managers from the risk of growth-induced dismissal after periods of good performance. The evidence for the United States broadly supports the model's predictions: Firms with better growth prospects experience higher CEO turnover and use more front-loaded compensation.

2017

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2017 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2017 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2017 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2017 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2017 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2017 (15 Papers)

2016

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2016 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2016 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2016 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2016 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2016 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2016 (15 Papers)

2015

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2015 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2015 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2015 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2015 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2015 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2015 (15 Papers)

2014

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2014 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2014 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2014 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2014 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2014 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2014 (15 Papers)

2013

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2013 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2013 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2013 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2013 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2013 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2013 (15 Papers)

2012

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2012 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2012 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2012 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2012 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2012 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2012 (15 Papers)

2011

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2011 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2011 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2011 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2011 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2011 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2011 (15 Papers)

2010

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2010 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2010 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2010 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2010 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2010 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2010 (15 Papers)

2009

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2009 (15 Papers)

2008

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2009 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2009 (15 Papers)

2007

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2007 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2007 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2007 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2007 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2007 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2007 (15 Papers)

2006

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2006 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2006 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2006 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2006 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2006 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2006 (15 Papers)

2005

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2005 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2005 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2005 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2005 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2005 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2005 (15 Papers)

2004

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2004 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2004 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2004 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2004 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2004 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2004 (15 Papers)

2003

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2003 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2003 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2003 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2003 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2003 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2003 (15 Papers)

2002

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2002 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2002 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2002 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2002 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2002 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2002 (15 Papers)

2001

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2001 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2001 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2001 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2001 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2001 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2001 (15 Papers)

2000

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 2000 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 2000 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 2000 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 2000 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 2000 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 2000 (15 Papers)

1999

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1998

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1997

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1996

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1995

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1994

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1993

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1992

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1991

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1990

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1999 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1999 (15 Papers)

1989

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1988

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1987

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1986

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1985

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1984

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1983

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1982

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1981

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)

1980

Volume 75 Issue 6, December 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 5, October 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 4, August 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 3, June 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 2, April 1980 (15 Papers)

Volume 75 Issue 1, February 1980 (15 Papers)