General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

We examine how sell-side equity analysts strategically disclose information of differing quality to the public versus the buy-side mutual fund managers to whom they are connected. We consider cases in which analysts recommend that the public buys a stock, but some fund managers sell it. We...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

Studies of intermediated arbitrage argue that bank balance sheets are an important consideration, yet little evidence exists on banks' positioning in this context. Using confidential supervisory data (covering $25 trillion in daily notional exposures) we examine banks' positions in connection...

We propose a unified theory of asset price determination encompassing both "conventional" and "alternative" asset classes (private equity, real estate, etc.). The model features disruption of old by young firms and skewness in the distribution of innovative rents among the young innovators. The...

Average idiosyncratic volatility and firm idiosyncratic volatility increase with the number of listed firms. Average industry idiosyncratic volatility increases with the number of listed firms in the industry. We ex-plain the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and the number of listed...

We explore the effects of physical and regulatory risks related to biodiversity loss on economic activity and asset values. We first develop a news-based measure of aggregate biodiversity risk and analyze how it varies over time. We also construct and publicly release several firm-level measures...

We propose a new methodology to build portfolios that hedge the economic and financial risks from climate change. Our quantity-based approach exploits information on how mutual fund managers trade in response to idiosyncratic changes in their climate risk beliefs. We exploit two types of...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...