Asset Management

A key distinction between over-the-counter markets and centralized exchanges is the non-anonymity of the transactions. In this paper, we develop a model of non-anonymous trading and compare its prices, liquidity, and efficiency of asset allocations against a baseline with anonymous transactions. The non-anonymity improves the market liquidity by reducing the concerns for adverse selection. More specifically, it allows the market participants to learn valuable information about their counterparties through repeated interactions and consequently enables them to form trading relationships.

We derive a measure of firm-level regulatory exposure from the text of corporate earnings calls. We use this measure to study the effect of regulation on companies’ growth, leverage, profitability, and equity returns. Higher regulatory exposure results in slower sales and asset growth, lower leverage, reduced profitability, but higher post-call equity returns. These effects are mitigated for larger firms. Our findings suggest that both compliance risk and physical operational cost are consequences of increased regulation, but the magnitude of the effects of compliance risk are larger.

Using a price-theoretic framework, we derive and empirically test a fundamental demand force shaping firms’ public disclosure decisions. Our framework suggests that the number of firms’ transacting stakeholders, not just their shareholders, is a major determinant of disclosure demand and, hence, firms’ decision to disclose publicly.

To meet the objectives of financial reporting in the IASB's Conceptual Framework, the "balance-sheet approach" embraced by the Framework is necessary but not sufficient. Critical, but largely overlooked, is the role of uncertainty, which we argue defines the role of accrual accounting as a distinctive source of information for investors when investment outcomes are uncertain. This role is in some sense paradoxical: on the one hand, uncertainty undermines both the balance sheet (because uncertain assets are unrecognized) and the income statement (because mismatching is unavoidable).

We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments as they lower the insurer's liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raise future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector's aggregate benefit from FDA approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year.

Pricing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions involves making tradeoffs between consumption today and unknown damages in the (distant) future. While decision making under risk and uncertainty is the forte of financial economics, important insights from pricing financial assets do not typically inform standard climate–economy models. Here, we introduce EZ-Climate, a simple recursive dynamic asset pricing model that allows for a calibration of the carbon dioxide (CO2) price path based on probabilistic assumptions around climate damages.

We propose the standard neoclassical model of investment under uncertainty with short-run adjustment frictions as a benchmark for earnings-return patterns absent accounting influences. We show that our proposed benchmark generates a wide range of earnings-return patterns documented in prior accounting research. Notably, our model generates a concave earnings-return relation, similar to that of Basu [1997], and predicts that the earnings-return concavity increases in the volatility of firms' underlying shock processes and decreases in investment levels.

We develop an empirical model of exchange rate returns, applied separately to samples of developed (DM) and developing (EM) economies’ currencies against the dollar. Monetary policy stance of the global central banks, measured via a natural-language-based approach, has a large effect on exchange rate returns over the ensuing year, is closely linked to the VIX, and becomes increasingly important in the post-crisis era.

Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.