Journal of Finance最新文献

We investigate hedge fund firms’ unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk-adjusted return difference between a firm's reported gross return and its portfolio return inferred from its disclosed long-equity holdings. Firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 6.36% per annum on a risk-adjusted basis. UP is negatively associated with a firm's trading costs and positively associated with intraquarter trading in equity positions, derivatives usage, short selling, and confidential holdings. We show that limited investor attention can delay investors’ response to UP and lead to longer lived predictability of fund firm performance.

Central bank balance sheet expansion, through actions like quantitative easing, is run through commercial banks. While this increases liquid central bank reserves held on commercial bank balance sheets, demandable uninsured deposits issued to finance the reserves also increase. Subsequent shrinkage in the central bank balance sheet may entail shrinkage in bank-held reserves without a commensurate reduction in deposit claims. Furthermore, during episodes of liquidity stress, when many claims on liquidity are called, surplus banks may hoard reserves. As a result, central bank balance sheet expansion may create less additional liquidity than typically thought, and indeed, may increase the probability and severity of episodes of liquidity stress.

Financial institutions received investments under the Troubled Asset Relief Program in a bad state of the world but repaid them in a relatively good state. We show that the recipients paid considerably lower returns to taxpayers compared to private-market securities with similar risk over the same investment horizon, resulting in a subsidy of over $50 billion on the preferred equity investment by the government. Ex-post renegotiation of contract terms limited the upside gains received by taxpayers in good times and contributed to the subsidy. These findings have important implications for the design and implementation of future bailouts. Our simple methodology for calculating the subsidy can be applied to evaluate the financial costs of other bailouts.

We investigate the economic value of cash management. In the legal marijuana industry, where only half of businesses have access to cash management services from a financial institution, we examine dispensary profitability using administrative and survey data. Our results show that businesses with cash management charge higher retail prices (8.3%), pay lower wholesale prices (7.3%), and have higher sales volume (19%). Together, these advantages create a 40% increase in profitability. These results support our model in which reputational capital and administrative costs drive profitability regardless of whether national banks, credit unions, or fintech provide the cash management functions.

We experimentally study the transmission of subjective expectations into actions. Subjects in our experiment report valuations that are far too insensitive to their expectations, relative to the prediction from a frictionless model. We propose that the insensitivity is driven by a noisy cognitive process that prevents subjects from precisely computing asset valuations. The empirical link between subjective expectations and actions becomes stronger as subjective expectations approach rational expectations. Our results highlight the importance of incorporating weak transmission into belief-based asset pricing models. Finally, we discuss how cognitive noise can provide a microfoundation for inelastic demand in the stock market.

We study noisy aggregation of dispersed information in financial markets without imposing parametric restrictions on preferences, information, and return distributions. We provide a general characterization of asset returns by means of a risk-neutral probability measure that features excess weight on tail risks. Moreover, we link excess weight on tail risks to observable moments such as forecast dispersion and accuracy, and argue that it provides a unified explanation for several prominent cross-sectional return anomalies. Simple calibrations suggest the model can account for a significant fraction of empirical returns to skewness, returns to disagreement, and interaction effects between the two.

A higher U.S. government debt-to-output (D-O) ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current D-O ratio. The market valuation of Treasurys is surprisingly insensitive to macro fundamentals. Instead, the future D-O ratio accounts for most of the variation because the D-O ratio is highly persistent. Systematic surplus forecast errors may help account for these findings. Since the start of the Global Financial Crisis, surplus projections have anticipated a large fiscal correction that failed to materialize.