Saving the Euro: Mitigating Financial or Trade Spillovers?

This paper analyzes through what channels the euro crisis affected firms and the efficacy of policies to mitigate the crisis. It analyzes stock price responses for 3,045 nonfinancial firms in 16 countries to four key policy events during 2010–11. Using precrisis benchmarks, it separates financial effects from trade effects and examines how bank and trade linkages propagated shocks. It finds that policy measures affected financially dependent firms more, particularly in creditor countries with greater bank exposure to peripheral euro countries, in statistically and economically significant ways. Trade linkages with peripheral countries played little role, although euro movements meant some differential effects.     

Rewarding Trading Skills without Inducing Gambling

This paper develops a model of active asset management in which fund managers may forgo alpha‐generating strategies, preferring instead to make negative‐alpha trades that enable them to temporarily manipulate investors' perceptions of their skills. We show that such trades are optimally generated by taking on hidden tail risk, and are more likely to occur when fund managers are impatient and when their trading skills are scalable, and generate a high profit per unit of risk. We propose long‐term contracts that deter this behavior by dynamically adjusting the dates on which the manager is compensated in response to her cumulative performance.     

Why Do Countries Mandate Accrual Accounting for Tax Purposes?

This study investigates why countries mandate accruals in the definition of corporate taxable income. Accruals alleviate timing and matching problems in cash flows, which smoothes taxable income and thus better aligns it with underlying economic performance. These accrual properties can be desirable in the tax setting as tax authorities seek more predictable corporate tax revenues. However, they can also make tax revenues procyclical by increasing the correlation between aggregate corporate tax revenues and aggregate economic activity. We argue that accruals shape the distribution of corporate tax revenues, which leads regulators to incorporate accruals into the definition of taxable income to balance the portfolio of government revenues and expenditures. Using a sample of 26 OECD countries, we find support for several theoretically motivated factors explaining the use of accruals in tax codes. We first provide evidence that corporate tax revenues are less volatile in high accrual countries, but high accrual countries collect relatively higher (lower) tax revenues when the corporate sector grows (contracts). Critically, we then show that accruals and smoother tax revenues are favored by countries with higher levels of government spending on public services and uncertain future expenditures, while countries with procyclical other tax collections favor cash rules and lower procyclicality of corporate tax revenues.     

The Real Effects of Credit Ratings: The Sovereign Ceiling Channel

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant effect on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation in corporate ratings due to rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policies, which require that firms' ratings remain at or below the sovereign rating of their country of domicile.     

Returns to Skills and the College Premium

A substantial literature documents the evolution of the college premium in the U.S. labor market over the last 40 years or so. There are at least three different interpretations of this fact: (i) shifts in the relative supply of and demand for college versus high school labor, (ii) shifts in the relative supply of and demand for skills in the college versus high school sector, and (iii) composition effects. We investigate how each of these components contributes to the dynamics of the college premium and find that all three play a role, but the increase in the college premium is primarily driven by the first component. We also find that during the 1980s, the college premium for high school workers diverged from the college premium for college workers and a substantial fraction of the gap that opens up is primarily due to the increase in the returns to cognitive skills.     

Equilibrium Subprime Lending

This paper develops an equilibrium model of a subprime mortgage market. Our goal is to offer a benchmark with which the recent subprime boom and bust can be compared. The model is tractable and delivers plausible orders of magnitude for borrowing capacities, as well as default and trading intensities. We offer simple explanations for several phenomena in the subprime market, such as the prevalence of teaser rates and the clustering of defaults. In our model, both nondiversifiable and diversifiable income risks reduce debt capacities. Thus, debt capacities need not be higher when a larger fraction of income risk is diversifiable.     

(Why) Do Central Banks Care about Their Profits?

We document that central banks are discontinuously more likely to report slightly positive profits than slightly negative profits, especially when political pressure is greater, the public is more receptive to extreme political views, and central bank governors are eligible for reappointment. The propensity to report small profits over small losses is correlated with higher inflation and lower interest rates. We conclude that there are agency problems at central banks, which give rise to discontinuous profit incentives that correlate with central banks’ policy choices and outcomes. These findings inform the debate about the political economy of central banking and central bank design.     

Executive Compensation Tied to ESG Performance: International Evidence

Using a wide sample of international publicly traded firms, this paper studies the rapidly increasing practice of incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics in executive compensation contracts. Our evidence suggests that this compensation practice varies at the country, industry, and firm levels in ways that are consistent with efficient incentive contracting. We also observe that reliance on ESG metrics in executive compensation arrangements is associated with engagement, voting, and trading by institutional investors, which suggests that firms could be adopting this practice to align their management's objectives with the preferences of certain shareholder groups. Finally, we find that the adoption of ESG Pay is accompanied by improvements in key ESG outcomes, but not by improvements in financial performance.     

Informational Black Holes in Financial Markets

We show that information aggregation in primary financial markets fails precisely when investors hold socially useful information for screening projects. Being wary of the Winner's Curse, less optimistic investors refrain from making financing offers, since their offers would be accepted only when a project is unviable. Their information is therefore lost. The Winner's Curse and associated information loss grow with the number of informed market participants, so that larger markets can lead to worse financing decisions and higher cost of capital for firms seeking financing. Precommitment to ration fundraising allocations, collusive club bidding, and shorting markets can mitigate the inefficiency.