Using supervisory data on operational losses from large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), we show that BHCs with socially responsible workforce policies suffer lower operational losses per dollar of total assets. The association significantly varies by the type of workforce policies and the type of operational losses. It is driven not only by small frequent losses but also by severe tail operational risk events. Further, the risk-reducing effects of the socially responsible workforce policies are stronger for larger BHCs with more employees. Our findings have important implications for banking organization performance, risk, and supervision.

We use the staggered enactment of anti-recharacterization laws as a plausibly exogenous shock to the value of securitizing collateral through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and test how collateral values impact corporate risk management. Following the laws’ enactment, we find increases in commodity, foreign exchange, and interest rate hedging, especially for firms with exposure to these risks and that rely on SPVs. Supporting the collateral constraints literature, the effect is weaker for firms that likely need the collateral for external financing, such as financially constrained firms. Our findings highlight fluctuations in collateral values as an important consideration in risk management decisions.

We examine the predictability of stock returns using implied volatility spreads (VS) from individual (nonindex) options. VS can occur under simple no-arbitrage conditions for American options when volatility is time-varying, suggesting that the VS-return predictability could be an artifact of firms’ sensitivities to aggregate volatility. Examining this empirically, we find that the predictability changes systematically with aggregate volatility and is positively related to the firms’ sensitivities to volatility risk. The alpha generated by VS hedge portfolios can be explained by aggregate volatility risk factors. Our results cannot be explained by firm-specific informed trading, transaction costs, or liquidity.

The average maturity of newly issued corporate bonds has declined substantially over the past 40 years, and the traditional determinants of debt maturity fail to explain this decline fully. We show that the changing composition of investors in the corporate bond market influences bond maturities. The results of a Granger causality test, an instrumental variable approach, and a natural experiment suggest that a decline in the insurance companies’ – which prefer long-term bonds – ownership share in the corporate bond market explains a significant part of the unexplained maturity decline. These findings illustrate how investor preferences can have real effects on corporations.

This article empirically analyzes the effect of foreign block acquisitions on U.S. target firms’ credit risk as measured by their credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Foreign block purchases lead to a greater increase in the target firms’ CDS premia post-acquisition compared to domestic block purchases. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are geographically and culturally more distant, and when they obtain majority control. The findings are consistent with an asymmetric information hypothesis, in which foreign owners are less effective monitors due to information barriers.

Disequilibrating macro shocks affect different firms’ prospects differently, increasing idiosyncratic variation in forward-looking stock returns before affecting economic growth. Consistent with most such shocks from 1947 to 2020 enhancing productivity, increased idiosyncratic stock return variation forecasts next-quarter real GDP growth, industrial production growth, and consumption growth both in-sample and out-of-sample. These effects persist after controlling for other leading economic indicators.

I examine whether competition from domestic industry rivals affects firms’ proclivity to undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) and their country location choices. I find that competition affects foreign production decisions and the geography of international investments. While firms enduring stiffer competition are significantly less likely to undertake FDI, this effect is heterogeneous across firms. Competition deters FDI more strongly when costs are heavier, whereas it has weaker effects when efficiency is higher, growth opportunities are valuable, and cash reserves are higher. FDI location models suggest that when going abroad, firms facing stronger competition are more likely to pursue economies of productivity and taxation.

I document a new stylized fact: The higher the degree of institutional ownership (IO) in a portfolio, the more time-varying expected returns rather than changes in expected cash flows drive changes in its valuation. Empirical evidence suggests that institutions’ time-varying sensitivity to the risk of holding stocks translates into time-varying expected returns on high-IO stocks. In my model, imperfect risk sharing between different types of investors generates cross-sectional differences in return predictability based on ownership, even among a priori identical stocks. My findings suggest an economic rationale for weak return predictability of small stocks and predictability reversals of stocks and real estate investment trusts.

This article investigates the short-side anomaly trading behavior of alternative mutual funds (AMFs) based on their short positions in U.S. domestic equities. In aggregate, AMFs demonstrate the ability to exploit well-documented stock market anomalies on the short side, and the overpriced stocks sold short by AMFs generate significant negative alpha. Further, AMFs’ short-side trades exhibit significant return predictability, which can at least partially derive from their ability to process public information on firm and anomaly characteristics. Finally, AMFs’ short-side anomaly-based trading activity and profitability appear to be more pronounced among the stocks with higher credit risk or dynamic short-selling risk.

Central counterparty (CCP) default waterfalls act as the last lines of defense in over-the-counter markets by managing and allocating resources to cover payment defaults. This article examines the impact of variations in waterfall design on financial system losses in the presence of payment network dependencies and frictions in the cleared and noncleared portion of the system. Through the development of a structural model, we draw several theoretical conclusions about the effectiveness of CCP default waterfalls under severe payment stress. These findings are empirically quantified by testing the model using supervisory data for the U.S. credit default swap market.

We show that the similarity of a firm’s technological expertise with that of other firms affects managerial labor market outcomes. Using each firm’s patent portfolio to estimate its technological expertise, we find that its similarity in technological expertise with other firms is strongly related to the benchmark group used for CEO compensation and job transitions. Furthermore, we show that a firm’s CEO pay is positively associated with the CEO compensation levels of technologically similar firms. Our results thus demonstrate the crucial role of technological similarity in determining the value of outside options and the boundaries of the managerial labor market.

We synthetically create option contracts on a corporate bond index using CDX swaptions, overcoming the limitations that stem from the lack of traded corporate bond options. Our approach allows us to estimate forward-looking moments concerning the corporate bond market in a model-free manner. By constructing an aggregate volatility measure and the associated variance risk premium, we examine the role of volatility risk in the corporate bond market. We highlight that the ex ante conditional second and higher moments we estimate from synthetic corporate bond options carry important implications for credit risk models, providing an extra basis for testing their validity.

We investigate whether international operations enhance information links between firms and foreign investors. Exploiting novel subsidiary-level data and within-location variations, we show that, after expanding into another country, a firm attracts greater investment allocation from funds from that country than from other foreign funds. This increase is economically significant, equivalent to one-fifth of the average firm weight in a country-specific portfolio. The observed effect cannot be attributed to funds’ influence, persists even when funds are already familiar with the firm, and helps them generate superior risk-adjusted returns. Our results suggest that firms’ cross-border economic activities contribute to global financial interconnectedness.

Using firm-level survey information, we investigate whether relationship lending affects firms’ employment decisions in the face of negative sales shock. We find that firms with a durable relationship with their main bank display significantly less employment growth sensitivity to such shocks, especially where these are transitory. The result is stronger for younger and smaller firms that benefit from tighter bank-firm relationships, and for firms in sectors or economic environments where the costs of employment adjustment are greater. Our findings indicate that relationship lending provides liquidity insurance to firms to meet their demand for labor hoarding.

This paper provides the first evidence of positive bank-to-bank spillovers. I show that geographic linkages between banks that engage in home lending in the same geographic region transmit positive shocks from one bank to another. I exploit shocks to the deposit base of banks located in counties experiencing shale oil booms and show that a nonshocked bank in a nonboom county expands lending more if its linkages have greater exposure to shale booms. Results show that the shock exposure of linkages has a positive impact on home prices of nonboom counties, and nonshocked banks located therein respond with increased lending.

We document that firms that expect their CEOs’ compensation to exceed the median CEO compensation of their Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) peers influence ISS to revise these peer sets. Controlling for changes in firm characteristics that ISS uses to select peers, we find that ISS applies an abnormally high turnover rate in the members of these peer sets and increases the representation of focal firms’ chosen peers. This turnover results in increases in the medians of the ISS peers’ CEO compensation and size. We find that these firms underperform and conclude that they attempt to camouflage high CEO pay to mitigate outrage costs.

We examine the costs of trading restrictions by exploiting an SEC rule change eliminating an approximately 80-day restriction period in private placements for small issuers. Using a difference-in-differences specification, we find that the restriction is binding, as dollar volume increases 19 percentage points vis-à-vis proceeds, and costly, as offering discounts fall by 8 percentage points. Discounts fall more for issuers with higher information asymmetry or longer restriction periods. We account for endogenous responses to the rule change. Overall, our findings suggest that trading restrictions are costly and have large effects on firms’ cost of capital.

We document that a significant number of insiders violate the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting requirements by filing open market transactions after the legally required deadline. Prior to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), 29% of transactions fell outside the required reporting window. Following SOX, 8% are delinquent. Violations cluster in periods of high information asymmetry, incentivizing insiders to keep trades private and earn abnormal returns. Collectively, these findings suggest that a subgroup of insiders personally benefit from violating SEC disclosure requirements. Evidence also suggests that blockholders provide governance for violations. Guilty insiders experience a reduction in board seats and an increased likelihood of turnover.

We find that the Campbell–Cochrane external-habit model can generate a value premium if the persistence of the consumption surplus is sufficiently low. Such low persistence is supported by micro evidence on consumption. If the mean and conditional volatility of consumption growth are highly persistent, as in the Bansal–Yaron long-run risk model, then fast-moving habit can also generate, without eroding the value premium: i) empirically sensible long horizon return predictability; and ii) a price–dividend ratio for market equity that exhibits the high autocorrelation found in the data. Fast-moving habit also delivers several empirical properties of market-dividend strips.

Using a proprietary data set on international private equity activity, we study the determinants of buyout investments across 61 countries and 19 industries over the period of 1990 to 2017. We find that countries with cyclically strong economies, more active stock and credit markets, and better rule of law experience more buyout activity. Countries also receive more buyout capital following investor protection and contract enforcement reforms. The set of determinants we identify appear somewhat unique to buyout investments, because other forms of investment such as foreign direct investment, gross capital formation, investments in R&D, and M&A activity do not respond similarly to these factors.