Version of Record online: 9/22/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70081
NIKLAS HÜTHER, KRISTOPH KLEINER
The random assignment of judges promotes fairness and underpins causal identification across the social sciences. Analyzing Chapter 11 bankruptcies, we find sophisticated parties “judge‐shop”: relative to secured hedge fund creditors, cases involving unsecured hedge fund creditors and equity holders are assigned judges with lower past conversion rates and higher unsecured recovery rates. Experienced legal counsel similarly influences assignment. Because judges are not assigned consecutive large cases, knowledgeable parties can judge‐shop by timing the filing date. We develop a method to measure the resulting bias and demonstrate the need for controls and bounded instrumental variable specifications in judge/examiner designs.
Discretionary Announcement Timing and Stock Returns
Version of Record online: 9/3/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70073
KERRY BACK, BRUCE I. CARLIN, SEYED M. KAZEMPOUR, CHLOE L. XIE
Discretionary announcement timing generates high conditional risk premia of stock returns and a pattern of negative drifts followed by positive jumps. Average announcement returns are much larger than unconditional risk premia. Capital Asset Pricing Model alphas turn negative when conditioning on nondisclosure because betas rise faster than risk premia prior to disclosures, but average announcement returns may appear to be too large relative to market risk when betas are estimated from past returns. The effects are amplified when multiple firms exercise discretion over the timing of correlated announcements. We present evidence that firms time earnings announcements in a manner consistent with our model.
Longevity, Health, and Housing Risk Management in Retirement
Version of Record online: 8/25/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70077
PIERRE‐CARL MICHAUD, PASCAL ST‐AMOUR
Annuities, long‐term care insurance, and reverse mortgages remain puzzlingly unpopular to manage post‐retirement longevity, health, and housing price risks. We use a flexible life‐cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated‐preference survey experiment of Canadian households to understand why. Key factors include high risk aversion, concern over long‐run risks, strong discounting of valuation in disability states, imperfect housing substitutability, and bequest motives. The remaining disinterest is accounted for by information frictions and inertia. We also document evidence of public insurance crowding out, spousal co‐insurance, and responsiveness to product bundling.
Version of Record online: 8/25/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70078
EHSAN AZARMSA, JOEL SHAPIRO
We present a model of competition between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) raters who acquire information about multiple unrelated categories and sell ratings. Raters specializing in different categories maximize the amount of information transmitted and surplus, and can be an equilibrium outcome. When investors place a high value on ESG performance across multiple categories, the unique equilibrium is for the raters to generalize—splitting their effort among the categories, resulting in less informative ratings. Greenwashing by firms can make generalization the only equilibrium. We also demonstrate that specialization maximizes ratings disagreement, and thus empirical measures of disagreement may be poor measures of surplus.
Reference‐Dependent Preferences and Sentiment‐Driven Asset Prices
Version of Record online: 8/22/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70079
JESS BENHABIB, ZHAORUI LI, XUEWEN LIU, PENGFEI WANG
This paper studies asset pricing under expectations‐based reference‐dependent preferences in a general equilibrium framework. We show that reference‐dependent preferences can generate self‐fulfilling risk panics, producing sentiment‐driven asset price fluctuations through a feedback loop between current prices and perceived future downside risk—dynamics impossible under standard expected utility. The model helps explain empirical puzzles including (i) excess volatility, (ii) asymmetric volatility, (iii) asymmetric sentiment over the business cycle, (iv) excess asset price comovement, and (v) weak correlations between stock returns and economic fundamentals, alongside a sizable equity premium. Additional empirical evidence based on closed‐end fund discounts and quantitative analysis support the theory.
Version of Record online: 8/21/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70075
MARINA GERTSBERG
How did #MeToo alter collaboration between women and men? I show junior female researchers start fewer projects after #MeToo. A decrease in collaborations with male coauthors—especially new senior male coauthors at the same institution—largely explains the decline. The decrease is larger at universities with higher perceived harassment accusation risk and smaller where both women and men publicly express greater awareness of gender issues. I find no evidence that reduced collaboration improves research outcomes for junior female researchers. The results suggest that #MeToo led to a breakdown in trust that came at a cost for junior women's career opportunities.
Do Equity and Options Markets Agree about Volatility?
Version of Record online: 7/23/2026 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70070
CARSTEN H. CHONG, VIKTOR TODOROV
We derive tight pricing kernel restrictions from options with same‐day expiration (“0DTEs”). These restrictions concern the volatility of small and frequent asset price moves that the equity and options markets must agree on in a frictionless economy. Their violation leads to pseudo‐arbitrage opportunities, characterized by nontrivial reward‐to‐risk ratios over arbitrarily short horizons and achieved by a combined position in 0DTEs and the underlying asset. Empirically, we find no evidence of feasible pseudo‐arbitrage opportunities, as transaction costs, estimation risk, and short‐term volatility risk prevent investors from taking advantage of small and infrequent disagreements about volatility between equity and options markets.