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...

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...

The risk sensitivity of international capital flow pressures is explored using a new Exchange Market Pressure index that combines pressures observed in exchange rate adjustments with model-based estimates of incipient pressures that are masked by foreign exchange interventions and policy rate...

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...

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 investigate how information processing frictions contribute to household suboptimal saving and investment behavior. We find that 60% of open accounts in college 529 savings plans are invested suboptimally due to high expenses and tax inefficiency. Such investments yield an expected loss of 9%...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

We study how the social transmission of public news influences investors' beliefs and securities markets. Using an extensive dataset to measure investor social networks, we find that earnings announcements from firms in higher-centrality locations generate stronger immediate price and trading...

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 model financial innovations such as Exchange-Traded Funds, smart beta products, and many index-based vehicles as composite securities (CSs) that facilitate trading the common factors in assets' liquidation values. Through accessing a larger basket of assets in endogenously chosen proportions,...