This paper provides new evidence about the behavior of hedge funds during the disruptions that occurred in the Treasury market in March 2020. In contrast to some recent policy papers arguing that hedge funds were a major amplifier of those disruptions, we show that aggregate Treasury positions...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

We estimate effects of voluntary and mandatory disclosure of carbon emissions on stock returns, volatility, and turnover. We find that voluntary disclosure of scope 1 emissions by companies results in lower stock returns relative to non-disclosing companies. However, a cost of disclosing...

The asset ownership structure in financial markets worldwide is dominated by large institutional investors. Relative to households, institutional investors own a larger fraction of assets, have a more concentrated distribution of ownership, and have significant active and passive components. We...

The question of whether and how mutual fund managers provide valuable services for their clients motivates one of the largest literatures in finance. One candidate explanation is that funds process information about future asset values and use that information to invest in high-valued assets....

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. Yet, many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. Because...

Who engages in green R&D and how is corporate behavior affected by green technical progress? Based on global patent filings, corporate financial reporting, and corporate carbon emissions we analyze corporate green and brown R&D activity and its effects in reducing carbon emissions. We find...

This paper shows how uncertainty about the type of return distribution (distribution uncertainty) can be incorporated in asset allocation decisions by using a novel, Bayesian semiparametric approach. To evaluate the economic importance of distribution uncertainty, the extent of changes in...

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from530 SEC investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we showthat insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value whenfacing...

Large institutional investors dominate asset ownership worldwide, raising questions about their impact on the functioning and efficiency of financial markets. In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium theory to study the distributional effects of asset ownership for price informativeness...