Fundamental Investment Analysis

Banks' exposure to large-scale asset purchases, as measured by the relative prevalence of mortgage-backed securities on their books, affects lending following unconventional monetary policy shocks. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, this paper finds strong effects of the first and third round of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE3) on credit. Highly affected commercial banks increase lending by 2 to 3% relative to their counterparts. QE2 had no significant impact, consistent with its exclusive focus on Treasuries sparsely held by banks.

We examine the relation between shareholder activism and voluntary disclosure. An important consequence of voluntary disclosure is less adverse selection in the capital markets. One class of traders that finds less adverse selection unprofitable is activist investors who target mispriced firms whose valuations they can improve. Consistent with this idea, we find that managers issue earnings and sales forecasts more frequently when their firm is more at risk of attack by activist investors, and that these additional disclosures reduce the likelihood of becoming an activist's target.

We exploit the release of a mobile application for a financial aggregation platform to analyze how technology adoption changes consumer financial decision making. The app reduced the cost of accessing personal financial information, and we find that this led to a drop in non-sufficient fund (NSF) fees. Because of the manner in which these fees are incurred, this represents an unambiguous welfare improvement for users of the platform. The leading explanation for this result appears to be mistake avoidance due to easier access to information.

We demonstrate a novel link between relationship-specific investments and risk in a setting where division managers operate under moral hazard and collaborate on joint projects. Specific investments increase efficiency at the margin. This expands the scale of operations and thereby adds to the compensation risk borne by the managers. Accounting for this investment/risk link overturns key findings from prior incomplete contracting studies.

We find important differences in dollar-based and dollar-neutral G10 carry trades. Dollar-neutral trades have positive average returns, are highly negatively skewed, are correlated with risk factors, and exhibit considerable downside risk. In contrast, a diversified dollar-carry portfolio has a higher average excess return, a higher Sharpe ratio, minimal skewness, is unconditionally uncorrelated with standard risk-factors, and exhibits no downside risk.

The incentive contracts of delegated investment managers may have unintended negative consequences for asset prices. I show that managers who are compensated for relative performance optimally shift their portfolio weights towards those of the benchmark when volatility rises, putting downward price pressure on overweight stocks and upward pressure on underweight stocks. In quarters when volatility rises most (top quintile), a portfolio of aggregate-underweight minus aggregate-overweight stocks returns 3% to 8% per quarter depending on the risk adjustment.

We introduce a new measure of emerging market sovereign credit risk: the local currency credit spread, defined as the spread of local currency bonds over the synthetic local currency risk-free rate constructed using cross-currency swaps. We find that local currency credit spreads are positive and sizable. Compared with credit spreads on foreign-currency-denominated debt, local currency credit spreads have lower means, lower cross-country correlations, and lower sensitivity to global risk factors.

Top 15 Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of 2015

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards market timing or stock picking skills as immutable attributes of a manager or fund. Yet, measures of these skills appear to vary over the business cycle. This paper offers a rational explanation, arguing that timing and picking are tasks. A skilled manager can choose how much of each task to attend to. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, we show that in booms, a manger should pick stocks and in recessions, he should pay more attention to his market timing.