This study provides an empirical analysis of the impact of Wisconsin and Ohio pension cut legislation on values of banks operating in Wisconsin and Ohio, banks operating in other states in which pension cut legislation was being considered as Wisconsin and Ohio went through its legislative...

We study the impact of interest rate changes on both the demand and supply of new light vehicles in an environment where consumers and manufacturers face their own interest rates. An increase in the consumers' interest rate raises their cost of financing and thus lowers the demand for new...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a "bubble," or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

This paper studies the sensitivity of investment in apartment building maintenance to building debt levels. I use a novel data set combining housing code violations from forty-five U.S. cities with apartment financing information to show that highly leveraged buildings tend to be less well...

Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Loss aversion has been used to explain why a high equity premium might be consistent with plausible levels of risk aversion. The intuition is that the different utility impact of wealth gains and losses leads loss-averse investors to behave similarly to investors with high risk aversion. But if...

Motivated by individuals' emotional response to risk at different time horizons, we model an 'anxious' agent - one who is more risk averse with respect to imminent risks than distant risks. Such preferences describe well-documented features of 1) individual behavior, 2) equilibrium prices, and...

We argue that buyout waves form in response to fluctuations in aggregate discount rates. In our model, discount rates alter the present value of cash flow improvements and the illiquidity premium demanded by buyout investors. We confirm our predictions empirically. Overall deal activity varies...

This paper reports aggregate statistics on securities lending activity based on a recently concluded pilot data collection by staff from the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Federal Reserve System, and staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its annual reports, the...