YOLO: Mortality Beliefs and Household Finance Puzzles

We study the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on life‐cycle behavior. With new survey evidence, we document that survival is underestimated (overestimated) by the young (old). We calibrate a canonical life‐cycle model to elicited beliefs. Relative to calibrations using actuarial probabilities, the young undersave by 26%, and retirees draw down their assets 27% slower, while the model's fit to consumption data improves by 88%. Cross‐sectional regressions support the model's predictions: Distorted mortality beliefs correlate with savings behavior while controlling for risk preferences, cognitive, and socioeconomic factors. Overweighting the likelihood of rare events contributes to mortality belief distortions.     

Closed Form Solutions for Term Structure Derivatives with Log-Normal Interest Rates

We derive a unified model that gives closed form solutions for caps and floors written on interest rates as well as puts and calls written on zero-coupon bonds. The crucial assumption is that simple interest rates over a fixed finite period that matches the contract, which we want to price, are log-normally distributed. Moreover, this assumption is shown to be consistent with the Heath-Jarrow-Morton model for a specific choice of volatility.     

Transfer Pricing Rules,OECD Guidelines,and Market Distortions

We study the impact of transfer pricing rules on prices, firms' organizational structure, and consumers' utility in a two‐country monopolistic competition model with source‐based profit taxes. Firms can either be multinationals and serve the foreign market through a fully controlled affiliate, or be exporters and serve the foreign market by contracting with an independent distributor. The use of the OECD's comparable uncontrolled transfer price (CUP) rule distorts firms' output and pricing decisions, because the comparable arm's length transactions between exporters and distributors—which serve as the benchmark—are not efficient. We show that the CUP rule is detrimental to consumers in the low‐tax country, yet benefits consumers in the high‐tax country when compared to the benchmark of unconstrained profit shifting. Using the OECD rule increases tax revenue at the expense of consumer surplus. Those results also hold under the alternative cost‐plus transfer pricing rule.     

The Structure of Voluntary Disclosure Narratives: Evidence from Tone Dispersion

We examine tone dispersion, or the degree to which tone words are spread evenly within a narrative, to evaluate whether narrative structure provides insight into managers’ voluntary disclosures and users’ responses to those disclosures. We find that tone dispersion is associated with current aggregate and disaggregated performance and future performance, managers’ financial reporting decisions, and managers’ incentives and actions to manage perceptions. Furthermore, we find that tone dispersion is associated with analysts’ and investors’ responses to conference call narratives. Our results suggest that tone dispersion both reflects and affects the information that managers convey through their narratives.     

Strategic Behavior and Underpricing in Uniform Price Auctions: Evidence from Finnish Treasury Auctions

We contribute to the debate on the optimal design of multiunit auctions by developing and testing robust implications of the leading theory of uniform price auctions on the bid distributions submitted by individual bidders. The theory, which emphasizes market power, has little support in a data set of Finnish Treasury auctions. A reason may be that the Treasury acts strategically by determining supply after observing bids, apparently treating the auctions as a repeated game between itself and primary dealers. Bidder behavior and underpricing react to the volatility of bond returns in a way that suggests bidders adjust for the winner's curse.     

Borrowing Constraints,Home Ownership and Housing Choice: Evidence from Intra‐Family Wealth Transfers

We study the impact of borrowing constraints on home ownership and housing demand by comparing the tenure choice and housing quality of consumers who receive intra‐family wealth transfers to those that do not. Our analysis is based on household‐level panel data providing information on the receipt of wealth transfers, changes in tenure status as well as changes in the size and quality of housing. On average we find that the receipt of a wealth transfer increases the propensity of consumers to transition from renters to home‐owners by 6–8 percentage points (35% of the sample mean). Additional analyses suggest that this effect is unlikely to be driven by wealth effects and can thus be attributed to the relaxation of borrowing constraints. By contrast, wealth transfers do not increase the likelihood that existing homeowners “trade‐up” to larger homes in better locations.