Discount-Rate Risk in Private Equity: Evidence from Secondary Market Transactions

Measures of private equity (PE) performance based on cash flows do not account for a discount-rate risk premium that is a component of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) alpha. We create secondary market PE indices and find that PE discount rates vary considerably. Net asset values are too smooth because they fail to reflect variation in discount rates. Although the CAPM alpha for our index is zero, the generalized public market equivalent based on cash flows is large and positive. We obtain similar results for a set of synthetic funds that invest in small cap stocks. Ignoring variation in PE discount rates can lead to a misallocation of capital.     

Deposit Insurance and Depositor Monitoring: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

The Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935 insured deposits up to $5,000 and limited interest paid by commercial banks. This essay uses a treatment-and-control estimation strategy to determine how those reforms influenced depositors’ reactions to information about banks’ balance sheets by comparing preferred and regular depositors at New York state banks. Before deposit insurance, regular depositors reacted more to information about banks, while preferred depositors reacted less. After, this difference diminished and almost disappeared. This change indicates insurance reduced monitoring, although depositors’ continued response to some information indicates that large, uninsured depositors continued to monitor banks, as the legislation intended.     

Retail Derivatives and Sentiment: A Sentiment Measure Constructed from Issuances of Retail Structured Equity Products

We use retail structured equity product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for large capitalization stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEP reference stocks based on a variety of factor models, and also predicts returns in Fama-MacBeth regressions that include a wide range of covariates. Consistent with our interpretation that SEP issuances reflect investor sentiment, aggregate SEP issuances are highly correlated with the Baker-Wurgler sentiment index. Tobit regressions reveal that proxies for attention and sentiment predict SEP issuance volumes, providing additional evidence consistent with the hypothesis that SEP issuances reflect sentiment.     

Disruption and Credit Markets

We show that over the past half-century, innovative disruptions were central to understanding corporate defaults. In a given year, industries experiencing abnormally high venture capital or initial public offering activity subsequently see higher default rates, higher segment exits by conglomerates, and higher yields on bonds issued by the firms in these industries. Overall, we find that disruption is a broad phenomenon, negatively affecting incumbent firms across the spectrum of age, valuation, and levers, with the exception of very large and low-leverage firms, in line with our central hypothesis.