In the Red: Overdrafts, Payday Lending, and the Underbanked
Version of Record online: 3/31/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13447
MARCO DI MAGGIO, ANGELA MA, EMILY WILLIAMS
The reordering of transactions from “high‐to‐low” is a controversial bank practice thought to maximize fees paid by low‐income customers on overdrawn accounts. We exploit a series of class‐action lawsuits that mandated that some banks cease the practice. Using alternative credit bureau data, we find that after banks cease high‐to‐low reordering, low‐income individuals reduce payday borrowing, increase consumption, realize long‐term improvements in financial health, and gain access to lower‐cost loans in the traditional financial system. These findings suggest that aggressive bank practices can create demand for alternative financial services and highlight an important link between the traditional and alternative financial systems.
Version of Record online: 3/18/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13432
JOHN WILLIAM HATFIELD, SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS, RICHARD LOWERY
High commissions in the U.S. residential real estate agency market pose a puzzle for economic theory because brokerage is not a concentrated industry. We model brokered markets as a game in which agents post prices for customers and then choose which other agents to work with. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which each agent conditions working with other agents on those agents' posted prices. Prices can therefore be meaningfully higher than the competitive level (for a fixed discount factor), regardless of the number of agents. Thus, brokered markets can remain uncompetitive even with low concentration and easy entry.
Creating Controversy in Proxy Voting Advice
Version of Record online: 3/16/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13438
ANDREY MALENKO, NADYA MALENKO, CHESTER SPATT
We analyze how a profit‐maximizing proxy advisor designs vote recommendations and research reports. The advisor benefits from producing informative, unbiased reports, but only partially informative recommendations, biased against the a priori likely alternative. Such recommendations induce close votes, increasing controversy and thereby the relevance and value of proxy advice. Our results suggest shifting from an exclusive emphasis on recommendations, highlighting the importance of both reports and recommendations in proxy advisors' information provision. They rationalize the one‐size‐fits‐all approach and help reinterpret empirical patterns of voting behavior, suggesting that proxy advisors' recommendations may not be a suitable benchmark for evaluating shareholders' votes.
Excess Capacity, Marginal q, and Corporate Investment
Version of Record online: 3/11/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13439
GUSTAVO GRULLON, DAVID L. IKENBERRY
Theory posits that when managers anticipate excess capacity, average q becomes a biased estimator of marginal q as the potential for underutilizing new capital reduces the marginal benefit of investing. After correcting for this source of measurement error, the explanatory power of Tobin's q substantially improves in time‐series and cross‐sectional regressions as well as in out‐of‐sample tests. These findings, together with a secular erosion in capacity utilization, help explain why corporate investment rates have been declining for decades despite average q increasing significantly. Our analysis indicates that economic rigidities have contributed to the persistent erosion in capacity utilization.
Intrahousehold Disagreement about Macroeconomic Expectations
Version of Record online: 3/9/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13437
DA KE
This paper highlights the simple fact that households typically consist of multiple members who may hold divergent views, a fact that existing approaches to measuring and modeling household macroeconomic expectations largely abstract from. Using unique data on the macroeconomic expectations of both spouses, I document substantial intrahousehold disagreement about inflation, economic recessions, and stock market returns. I further show that household asset allocation decisions are shaped by disagreement between spouses about future stock returns, and a preregistered randomized survey experiment confirms the causal impact of such disagreement on portfolio choice.
Banks, Low Interest Rates, and Monetary Policy Transmission
Version of Record online: 3/9/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13436
OLIVIER WANG
I study how the secular decline in interest rates affects banks' intermediation spreads and credit supply. Following a permanent decrease in rates, bank lending may rise initially but contracts in the long run. As lower rates compress deposit spreads even well above the zero lower bound, banks' retained earnings, equity, and lending fall until loan spreads have risen enough to offset the reduction in deposit spreads. A higher inflation target can support bank lending at the cost of higher liquidity premia. I find support for the model's predictions in U.S. aggregate and bank‐level data.
How Credit Cycles across a Financial Crisis
Version of Record online: 3/4/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13431
ARVIND KRISHNAMURTHY, TYLER MUIR
We analyze the behavior of credit and output in financial crises using data on credit spreads and credit growth. Crises are marked by a sharp rise in credit spreads, signaling sudden shifts in expectations. The severity of a crisis can be predicted by the extent of credit losses (spread increases) and financial sector fragility (precrisis credit growth). This interaction is a key feature of crises. Postcrisis recessions are typically severe and prolonged. Notably, precrisis spreads tend to drop to low levels while credit growth accelerates, indicating that credit supply expansions often precede crises. The 2008 crisis aligns with these patterns.
In Too Deep: The Effect of Sunk Costs on Corporate Investment
Version of Record online: 3/4/2025 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13430
MARIUS GUENZEL
Sunk costs are unrecoverable costs that should not affect decision making. I provide evidence that firms systematically fail to ignore sunk costs and that this leads to significant investment distortions. In fixed‐exchange‐ratio stock mergers, aggregate market fluctuations after parties enter into a binding merger agreement induce plausibly exogenous variation in the final acquisition cost. These quasi‐random cost shocks strongly predict firms' commitment to an acquired business following deal completion, with an interquartile cost increase reducing subsequent divestiture rates by 8% to 9%. Consistent with an intrapersonal sunk cost channel, distortions are concentrated in firm‐years in which the acquiring CEO is still in office.