Journal of Financial Economics最新文献

We exploit the extinction of the thrift supervisor (OTS) to analyze the effects of supervision on bank lending and bank management. We first show that the OTS replacement resulted in stricter supervision of former OTS banks. Next, we analyze the ensuing lending effects and show that former OTS banks on average increase small business lending by roughly 10 percent. This increase is concentrated in well-capitalized banks and especially in banks that changed management practices following the supervisory transition. These findings suggest that stricter supervision operates not only through the enforcement of loss recognition and capital adequacy, but can also act as a catalyst for operational changes that correct deficiencies in bank management and lending practices, which in turn increase lending.

We examine whether discrimination affects customers’ willingness to pay their suppliers. Using a dataset of detailed trade credit networks, we find that when facing a macroeconomic shock, customers delay payments to their suppliers with female or black trade credit officers at a 10%–20% higher rate relative to their payments to non-minorities. These results hold after controlling for a host of economic differences between minority groups and non-minority groups. In particular, we exploit the complexity of the supply chain network – wherein suppliers transact with multiple customers in each month and customers transact with multiple suppliers in each month – to estimate within-relationship changes in payment behavior during periods of financial hardship. Results indicate that the largest increases in payment delays are between customers that are classified as having racial or gender biases and suppliers that have minority lead credit officers. The results suggest that biased beliefs and preferences play a critical role in trade credit.

In household finance markets, inactive households can implicitly cross-subsidize active households who promptly respond to financial incentives. We assess the magnitude and distribution of cross-subsidies in the mortgage market. To do so, we build a structural model of household mortgage refinancing and estimate it on rich administrative data covering the stock of outstanding mortgages in the UK. We estimate sizeable cross-subsidies that flow from relatively poorer households and those located in less-wealthy areas towards richer households and those located in wealthier areas. Our work highlights how the design of household finance markets can contribute to wealth inequality.

We examine social media attention and sentiment from three major platforms: Twitter, StockTwits, and Seeking Alpha. We find that, even after controlling for firm disclosures and news, attention is highly correlated across platforms, but sentiment is not: its first principal component explains little more variation than purely idiosyncratic sentiment. Using market events, we attribute differences across platforms to differences in users (e.g., professionals versus novices) and differences in platform design (e.g., character limits in posts). We also find that sentiment and attention contain different return-relevant information. Sentiment predicts positive next-day returns, but attention predicts negative next-day returns. These results highlight the importance of considering both social media sentiment and attention, and of distinguishing between different investor social media platforms.

This paper investigates fractional share trading. We develop a latency-based method for identifying a large sample of fractional share trades. We find that high-priced stocks, meme stocks, IPOs, SPACs, and popular retail stocks exhibit considerable numbers of these tiny trades. We surmise that this reflects dollar-based order entry, with many tiny trades being fractional components of larger orders. We show that our fractional trade measure is predictive of future liquidity and volatility, suggesting a new metric to capture the information in retail trades. We identify how data and reporting protocols preclude knowing the extent of fractional share trading, inflate volume data, and provide censured samples of these off-exchange trades.

We study the diversification and welfare effects of a large US robo-advisor on the portfolios of previously self-directed investors and document five facts. First, robo-advice reshapes portfolios by increasing indexing and reducing home bias, number of assets held, and fees. Second, these portfolio changes contribute to higher Sharpe ratios. Third, those who benefit most from robo-advice are investors who did not have high exposure to equities or indexing and had poorer diversification levels. Fourth, robo-advice decreases the time investors dedicate to managing their investments. Fifth, those investors who benefit most are more likely to join the service and not quit it.

We isolate the information channel of peer effects in consumption in a setting that excludes a role for common shocks or social pressure—a spending panel paired with crowdsourced information about anonymous “peers” elicited at different times. Consumers converge to peers’ spending, and more so when peer signals are more informative. Convergence is asymmetric: within 12 months of information provision, overspenders close 17% and underspenders 5% of their gap relative to peers. We exploit the quasi-random assignment to peer groups in an instrumental-variable strategy and implement an experiment for external validity. Our results are consistent with information-based theories of overconsumption.

Markets can give false impressions of liquidity and stability if failed attempts to trade are ignored. For collateralized loan obligations, we quantify this bias by estimating the total cost of immediacy (TCI) which incorporates failure rates and failure costs. TCI is substantially higher than the observed cost, 0.3–3.8% versus 0.04–0.12% across credit-quality tranches because trade failures are frequent, failure costs are large, and failure costs and rates are correlated. TCI is almost double the realized gains from trade for low-rated tranches. Overall, auction-based over-the-counter markets become illiquid and fragile, especially during stressful periods for low-rated assets.

Each time a stock gets added to or dropped from an index, we ask: “How much money would have to be tracking that index to explain the huge spike in rebalancing volume we observe on reconstitution day?” While index funds held $16\text{\%}$ of the US stock market in 2021, we put the overall passive ownership share at $33.5\text{\%}$. Our headline number is twice as large because it reflects index funds as well as other kinds of passive investors, such as institutional investors with internally managed index portfolios and active managers who are closet indexing.

Privately issued money often bears default risk, which creates transaction frictions when used as a medium of exchange. The late 19th century US provides a unique context to evaluate the real effects of supplying a new type of money that is safe from default. We measure the local change in “monetary” transaction frictions with a market access approach derived from general equilibrium trade theory. Consistent with theories hypothesizing that lowering transaction frictions benefits the traded and inputs-intensive sectors, we find an increase in traded goods production, in the share of manufacturing output and employment, and in innovation.