{"title":"Investment when new capital is hard to find","authors":"Olivier Darmouni , Andrew Sutherland","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103806","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We examine how a fixed capital supply shortage affects firm investment. Using equipment transaction–level data, we find pandemic-driven production disruptions significantly altered capital reallocation patterns across firms. A surge in used capital trading activity softened the investment decline, as firms acquired used capital from distant and dissimilar counterparts. Younger firms were disproportionately affected even though they rarely purchase new capital: while in normal times older firms sell their capital to younger firms, following a supply shortage, older firms compete for used capital, pricing out younger firms. Our evidence highlights the crucial role of secondary markets and distributive externalities for corporate investment.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103806"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139744243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Motivating collusion","authors":"Sangeun Ha , Fangyuan Ma , Alminas Žaldokas","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103798","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We examine how executive compensation can be designed to facilitate product market collusion. We look at the 2013 decision to close several regional offices of the U.S. Department of Justice, which lowered antitrust enforcement for firms located near these closed offices. We argue this made collusion more appealing to shareholders, and find that these firms increased the sensitivity of executive pay to local rivals' performance, consistent with rewarding the managers for colluding with them. The affected CEOs were also granted longer vesting periods, which provides long-term incentives that could foster collusive arrangements.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103798"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139737464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ben Charoenwong , Zachary T. Kowaleski , Alan Kwan , Andrew G. Sutherland
{"title":"RegTech: Technology-driven compliance and its effects on profitability, operations, and market structure","authors":"Ben Charoenwong , Zachary T. Kowaleski , Alan Kwan , Andrew G. Sutherland","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103792","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Compliance-driven investments in technology—or “RegTech”—are growing rapidly. To understand the effects on the financial sector, we study firms’ responses to new internal control requirements. Affected firms make significant investments in ERP and hardware. These expenditures then enable complementary investments that are leveraged for noncompliance purposes, leading to modest savings from avoided customer complaints and misconduct. IT budgets rise and profits fall, especially at small firms, and acquisition activity and market concentration increase. Our results illustrate how regulation can directly and indirectly affect technology adoption, which in turn affects noncompliance functions and market structure.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103792"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139726425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human capital risk and portfolio choices: Evidence from university admission discontinuities","authors":"Philippe d'Astous , Stephen H. Shore","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103793","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Theory suggests that increasing idiosyncratic, uninsurable labor income risk may cause individuals to reduce the risk in their financial assets. This relationship is confounded empirically by the tendency of risk tolerant people to choose riskier careers and hold riskier portfolios, leading to an upward-biased estimate of the effect of earnings risk on risky assets holdings. We overcome this identification problem by exploiting a discontinuity built into the Danish national university admissions system, which provides quasi-random assignment of similar applicants to programs with different earnings volatility profiles. Our methodology allows us to measure the causal impact of enrolling in a high-volatility program, holding fixed the average program earnings and human capital betas. We show that entering a program whose enrollees subsequently experience volatile earnings causes students to have more volatile earnings and, ceteris paribus, to hold fewer risky assets and be less likely to participate in the stock market. We calibrate our empirical results to a portfolio choice model with risky labor income that fits our empirical findings well with modest participation costs, myopic behavior, and reasonable levels of risk aversion.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103793"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139726424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
David Ardia , Laurent Barras , Patrick Gagliardini , Olivier Scaillet
{"title":"Is it alpha or beta? Decomposing hedge fund returns when models are misspecified","authors":"David Ardia , Laurent Barras , Patrick Gagliardini , Olivier Scaillet","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103805","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We develop a novel approach to separate alpha and beta under model misspecification. It comes with formal tests to identify less misspecified models and sharpen the return decomposition of individual funds. Our hedge fund analysis reveals that: (i) prominent models are as misspecified as the CAPM, (ii) several factors (time-series momentum, variance, carry) capture alternative strategies and lower performance in all investment categories, (iii) fund heterogeneity in alpha and beta is large—an important result for fund selection and models of active management, (iv) performance is increasingly similar to mutual funds, (v) fund valuation is sensitive to investor sophistication.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103805"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139733002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thomas Geelen , Jakub Hajda , Erwan Morellec , Adam Winegar
{"title":"Asset life, leverage, and debt maturity matching","authors":"Thomas Geelen , Jakub Hajda , Erwan Morellec , Adam Winegar","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103796","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Capital ages and must eventually be replaced. We propose a theory of financing in which firms borrow to finance investment and deleverage as capital ages to have enough financial slack to finance replacement investments. To achieve these dynamics, firms issue debt with a maturity that matches the useful life of assets and a repayment schedule that reflects the need to free up debt capacity as capital ages. In the model, leverage and debt maturity are negatively related to capital age while debt maturity and the length of debt cycles are positively related to asset life. We provide empirical evidence that strongly supports these predictions.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103796"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X24000199/pdfft?md5=39682f846b13f189b686b0d0cbed6bc9&pid=1-s2.0-S0304405X24000199-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139715071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Causal effects of closing businesses in a pandemic","authors":"Jean-Noël Barrot , Maxime Bonelli , Basile Grassi , Julien Sauvagnat","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103794","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We study whether state-level mandatory business closures implemented in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 causally affect economic and health outcomes. Using plausibly exogenous variations in exposure to these restrictions, we find that they impose substantial losses to firms and workers, the former bearing approximately two thirds of the cost, consistent with firms partially insuring their workers. We show that mandatory business closures have a significant negative causal effect on mortality rates, particularly in areas featuring contact-intensive occupations. We discuss the assumptions under which the health benefits of business closures exceed their associated economic costs.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103794"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X24000175/pdfft?md5=020b1c28f9ae1ab1580851a2b9c1d6f6&pid=1-s2.0-S0304405X24000175-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139715072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How does competition affect retail banking? Quasi-experimental evidence from bank mergers","authors":"Jack Liebersohn","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103797","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper studies bank antitrust rules which discontinuously shift bank mergers' competitive impact. The likelihood of mandatory divestiture rises sharply for mergers in markets above a threshold level of concentration, leading to an increase in the number of banks in these markets. Consistent with greater competition, intervention leads to higher deposit rates. Mortgage originations rise by 11%, from both refinancing and purchases. However, small business loan quantities do not change. The effects of intervention do not dissipate over time, and nonbank lenders respond similarly to banks. Overall, antitrust rules can increase bank competition, but relationships protect banks from competitors.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"154 ","pages":"Article 103797"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X24000205/pdfft?md5=4843eb0dae887c2835e8dccd63e65126&pid=1-s2.0-S0304405X24000205-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139710280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Richard Friberg , Itay Goldstein , Kristine W. Hankins
{"title":"Corporate responses to stock price fragility","authors":"Richard Friberg , Itay Goldstein , Kristine W. Hankins","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103795","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study shows that firms regard stock price fragility - exposure to non-fundamental demand shocks stemming from the composition of equity ownership - as a salient corporate risk. We model ex ante corporate responses to higher potential for <em>future</em> stock market misvaluation and then empirically document that within firm variation in equity fragility has effects in line with the model: higher fragility raises cash holdings and lowers investment. Multiple natural experiments support a causal interpretation of the results. The results are shown to be more prominent in the face of high uncertainty and financial constraints. The evidence presents a new dimension of how managerial expectations affect corporate policies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"153 ","pages":"Article 103795"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139694279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Miguel Faria-e-Castro , Pascal Paul , Juan M. Sánchez
{"title":"Evergreening","authors":"Miguel Faria-e-Castro , Pascal Paul , Juan M. Sánchez","doi":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103778","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfineco.2024.103778","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We develop a simple model of concentrated lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to firms that are close to default. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Banks that own a larger share of a firm's debt provide distressed firms with relatively more credit at lower interest rates. Building on this empirical validation, we incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening affects aggregate outcomes, resulting in lower interest rates, higher levels of debt, and lower productivity.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51346,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Financial Economics","volume":"153 ","pages":"Article 103778"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139573512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}