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...

Using a two-period model of a commodity market with a large number of atomistic consumers and two strategic sellers, we show that a speculator with access to storage can lower the market price while buying and raise the price while selling by clever use of limit, stop-loss, and market orders....

The traditional model of bank-led financial intermediation, where banks issue demandable deposits to savers and make informationally sensitive loans to borrowers, has seen a dramatic decline since 1970s. Instead, private credit is increasingly intermediated through arms-length transactions, such...

The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal rise of digital wallets, and the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated their adoption globally. Such e-wallets provide not only a conduit to external bank accounts but also internal payment options, including the ever-popular Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL)....

In recent years, assets of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) have grown significantly relative to those of banks. These two sectors are commonly viewed either as operating in parallel, performing different activities, or as substitutes, performing substantially similar activities, with...

We analyze the effect of a major central bank digital currency (CBDC) - the digital euro - on the payment industry to find remarkably heterogeneous effects. Stock prices of U.S. payment firms decrease, while stock prices of European payment firms increase in response to positive announcements on...

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...

China's financial system has been integral to its spectacular economic growth over the past 40 years. We review the recent literature on China's financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of Aggregate Financing to the Real Economy (AFRE), a broad measure...

Cryptomining, the clearing of cryptocurrency transactions, uses large quantities of electricity. We document that cryptominers' use of local electricity implies higher electricity prices for existing small businesses and households. Studying the electricity market in Upstate NY and using the...

We analyze a large number of industry- and company-level filings of global institutional investors to provide the first comprehensive estimate of foreign investors' U.S. dollar (USD) security holdings and currency hedging practices. We document four stylized facts. First, driven by increasing...