Uncovering the Hidden Effort Problem
Version of Record online: 2/17/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13429
AZI BEN‐REPHAEL, BRUCE I. CARLIN, ZHI DA, RYAN D. ISRAELSEN
We analyze minute‐by‐minute Bloomberg online status and study how the effort provision of executives in public corporations affects firm value. While executives spend most of their time doing other activities, patterns of Bloomberg usage allow us to characterize their work habits as measures of effort provision. We document a positive effect of effort on unexpected earnings and cumulative abnormal returns following earnings announcements, and a reduction in credit default swap spreads. This is robust to using exogenous weather patterns as an instrument. Long‐short, calendar‐time effort portfolios earn significant average daily returns. Finally, we revisit important agency issues from the literature.
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders
Version of Record online: 2/11/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13428
W. SCOTT FRAME, RUIDI HUANG, ERICA XUEWEI JIANG, YEONJOON LEE, WILL SHUO LIU, ERIK J. MAYER, ADI SUNDERAM
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are underrepresented among loan officers. Minority borrowers are less likely to complete mortgage applications, have completed applications approved, and to ultimately take up a loan. These disparities are reduced when minority borrowers work with minority loan officers. These pairings also lead to lower default rates, suggesting minority loan officers have an informational advantage with minority borrowers. Our results suggest minority underrepresentation among loan officers reduces minority borrowers’ access to credit.
Repo over the Financial Crisis
Version of Record online: 2/10/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13406
ADAM COPELAND, ANTOINE MARTIN
This paper uses new data to provide a comprehensive view of repo activity during the 2007 global financial crisis. We show that activity declined much more in the bilateral segment of the market than in the tri‐party segment. Surprisingly, a large share of the decline in activity is driven by repos backed by Treasury securities. Further, a disproportionate share of the decline in repo activity is connected to securities dealer's market‐making activity. In particular, the evidence suggests that at least part of the decline is not driven by clients pulling away from securities dealers because of counterparty credit concerns.
Feedback Effects and Systematic Risk Exposures
Version of Record online: 1/30/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13427
SNEHAL BANERJEE, BRADYN BREON‐DRISH, KEVIN SMITH
We model the “feedback effect” of a firm's stock price on investment in projects exposed to a systematic risk factor, like climate risk. The stock price reflects information about both the project's cash flows and its discount rate. A cash‐flow‐maximizing manager treats discount rate fluctuations as “noise,” but a price‐maximizing manager interprets such variation as information about the project's net present value. This difference qualitatively changes how investment behavior varies with the project's risk exposure. Moreover, traditional objectives (e.g., cash flow or price maximization) need not maximize welfare because they do not correctly account for hedging and risk‐sharing benefits of investment.
Crisis Interventions in Corporate Insolvency
Version of Record online: 1/30/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13421
SAMUEL ANTILL, CHRISTOPHER CLAYTON
We model the optimal resolution of insolvent firms in general equilibrium. Collateral‐constrained banks lend to (i) solvent firms to finance investments and (ii) distressed firms to avoid liquidation. Liquidations create negative fire‐sale externalities. Liquidations also relieve bank balance–sheet congestion, enabling new firm loans that generate positive collateral externalities by lowering bank borrowing rates. Socially optimal interventions encourage liquidation when firms have high operating losses, high leverage, or low productivity. Surprisingly, larger fire sales promote interventions encouraging more liquidations. We study synergies between insolvency interventions and macroprudential regulation, bailouts, deferred loss recognition, and debt subordination. Our model elucidates historical crisis interventions.
Version of Record online: 1/30/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13423
JOSEPH KALMENOVITZ, MICHELLE LOWRY, EKATERINA VOLKOVA
Regulatory fragmentation occurs when multiple federal agencies oversee a single issue. Using the full text of the Federal Register, the government's official daily publication, we provide the first systematic evidence on the extent and costs of regulatory fragmentation. Fragmentation increases the firm's costs while lowering its productivity, profitability, and growth. Moreover, it deters entry into an industry and increases the propensity of small firms to exit. These effects arise from redundancy and, more prominently, from inconsistencies between government agencies. Our results uncover a new source of regulatory burden, and we show that agency costs among regulators contribute to this burden.
Version of Record online: 1/30/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13424
FLORIAN HOFFMANN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROV
The voluntary departure of hard‐to‐replace skilled workers worsens firm prospects, which can lead to additional departures. We develop a model in which firms design compensation to limit the risk of such “worker runs.” To achieve cost‐efficient retention, firms combine fixed wages with dilutable compensation—such as vesting equity or bonus pools—which pays remaining workers more when others leave but gets diluted otherwise. Compensating (identical) workers with differently structured compensation, that is, with a different mix of output‐dependent and output‐independent pay, can further mitigate the risk of worker runs by ensuring a critical retention level in a cost‐efficient way.
Wealth and Insurance Choices: Evidence from U.S. Households
Version of Record online: 1/30/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13426
MICHAEL J. GROPPER, CAMELIA M. KUHNEN
Using administrative data for 63,000 individuals across 2,500,000 person‐month observations, we find that wealthier individuals have better life insurance coverage, controlling for the value of the asset insured, namely, the consumption needs of dependents. This positive wealth‐insurance correlation, which is surprising given the prevailing view that wealth substitutes for insurance, persists after allowing for wealth‐related differences in risk or bequest preferences, pricing, background risk, education, employment, or liquidity constraints. Our findings call for further investigation of this wealth‐coverage correlation but support theories emphasizing the consumption‐smoothing role of insurance across not only states of the world, but also time.
Version of Record online: 1/24/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13422
CECILIA PARLATORE, THOMAS PHILIPPON
We study the optimal design of stress scenarios. A principal manages the unknown risk exposures of agents by asking them to report losses under hypothetical scenarios before taking remedial actions. We apply a Kalman filter to solve the learning problem, and we relate the optimal design to the risk environment, the principal's preferences, and available interventions. In a banking context, optimal capital requirements cover losses under an adverse scenario, while targeted interventions depend on covariances among residual exposures and systematic risks. Our calibration reveals that information is particularly valuable for targeted interventions as opposed to broad capital requirements.
The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital
Version of Record online: 1/22/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13425
DANIEL GREEN, BENJAMIN N. ROTH
Portfolio allocation decisions increasingly incorporate social values. We develop a tractable framework to study how competition between investors to own socially valuable assets affects social welfare. Relative to the most common social‐investing strategies, we identify alternative strategies that result in higher impact and higher financial returns. We identify strategies for investors to have impact when impact is difficult to measure. From the firm's perspective, increasing profitability can have greater impact than directly increasing social value. We present new empirical evidence on the social preferences of investors that demonstrates the practical relevance of our theory.
Pricing Poseidon: Extreme Weather Uncertainty and Firm Return Dynamics
Version of Record online: 1/13/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13416
MATHIAS S. KRUTTLI, BRIGITTE ROTH TRAN, SUMUDU W. WATUGALA
We empirically analyze firm‐level uncertainty generated from extreme weather events, guided by a theoretical framework. Stock options of firms with establishments in a hurricane's (forecast) landfall region exhibit large implied volatility increases, reflecting significant uncertainty (before) after impact. Volatility risk premium dynamics reveal that investors underestimate such uncertainty. This underreaction diminishes for hurricanes after Sandy, a salient event that struck the U.S. financial center. Despite constituting idiosyncratic shocks, hurricanes affect hit firms' expected stock returns. Textual analysis of calls between firm management, analysts, and investors reveals that discussions about hurricane impacts remain elevated throughout the long‐lasting high‐uncertainty period after landfall.
Version of Record online: 12/30/2024 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13417
INDIRA PURI
I introduce and test for preference for simplicity in choice under risk. I characterize the theory axiomatically, and derive its properties and unique predictions relative to canonical models. By designing and running theoretically motivated experiments, I document that people value simplicity in ways not fully captured by existing models that study risk premia in financial markets. Participants' risk premia increase as complexity increases, holding moments fixed; their dominance violations increase in complexity; their behavior is predicted by simplicity's characterizing axiom; and their complexity aversion is heterogeneous in cognitive ability. None of expected utility theory, cumulative prospect theory, prospect theory, rational inattention, sparsity, salience, or probability weighting that differs by number of outcomes fully capture the experimental findings. I generalize the underlying theory to additionally capture broader measures of complexity, including obfuscation, computation, and language effects.
Sustainability or Greenwashing: Evidence from the Asset Market for Industrial Pollution
Version of Record online: 12/30/2024 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13412
RAN DUCHIN, JANET GAO, QIPING XU
We study the asset market for pollutive plants. Firms divest pollutive plants in response to environmental pressures. Buyers are firms facing weaker environmental pressures that have supply chain relationships or joint ventures with the sellers. While pollution levels do not decline following divestitures, sellers highlight their sustainable policies in subsequent conference calls, earn higher returns as they sell more pollutive plants, and benefit from higher Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings and lower compliance costs. Overall, the asset market allows firms to redraw their boundaries in a manner perceived as environmentally friendly without real consequences for pollution but with substantial gains from trade.
Version of Record online: 12/20/2024 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13410
ROBIN GREENWOOD, MARCO SAMMON
The abnormal return associated with a stock being added to the S&P 500 has fallen from an average of 7.4% in the 1990s to less than 1% over the past decade. This has occurred despite a significant increase in the share of stock market assets linked to the index. A similar pattern has occurred for index deletions, with large negative abnormal returns during the 1990s but an average return of only 0.1% between 2010 and 2020. We investigate the drivers of this phenomenon and discuss implications for market efficiency. We document a similar decline in the index effect among other families of indices.
Working More to Pay the Mortgage: Household Debt, Interest Rates, and Family Labor Supply
Version of Record online: 12/16/2024 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13413
Michał Zator
I show that households work and earn more (less) when their floating‐rate mortgage payments quasi‐exogenously increase (decrease). The response is sizable and asymmetric: on average, households adjust their income by 35% of the change in their mortgage payment, but the response is significantly stronger following an increase in payments. While men in dual‐earner, childless households respond the most on average, the asymmetry is most pronounced for women and young workers, who respond particularly strongly to payment increases. The asymmetry of the labor supply elasticity may help explain the wide range of elasticities found in previous research.