We examine the relationship between the number of bank relationships and firms' performance, evaluating possible differential effects related to firms' size. Our sample of firms from Italy includes many small firms, 99 percent of which are not listed and for which bank debt is a major source of...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that are central players in U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Over the past decade, these institutions have amassed enormous mortgage- and non-mortgage-oriented investment portfolios that pose significant interest-rate risks to the...

The risk premia assigned to economic (non-traded) risk factors can be decomposed into three parts: i) the risk premia on maximum-correlation portfolios mimicking the factors; ii) (minus) the covariance between the non-traded components of the candidate pricing kernel of a given model and the...

This paper considers two alternative formulations of the linear factor model (LFM) with nontraded factors. The first formulation is the traditional LFM, where the estimation of risk premia and alphas is performed by means of a cross-sectional regression of average returns on betas. The second...

The equity premium of interest in theoretical models is the extra return investors anticipate when purchasing risky stock instead of risk-free debt. Unfortunately, we do not observe this ex ante premium in the data; we only observe the returns that investors actually receive ex post, after they...

We apply an event-study methodology on over 10,000 Morningstar star rating changes and find that Morningstar has substantial independent influence on the investment allocation decisions of retail mutual fund investors. It is the discrete change in the star rating itself, and not the change in...

This paper proposes a novel approach that has the potential to hasten the eradication of gender disparities in employment. This approach relies upon the concept of statistical process control (SPC) to more systematically remedy disparate employment outcomes for women. SPC also serves as a new...

We analyze the dynamics of labor migration and the insurance role of remittances in a two-country, real business cycle framework. Emigration increases with the expected stream of future wage gains but is dampened by the sunk cost reflecting border enforcement. During booms in the destination...