Britain’s Great Railway Mania of the 1840s: The Roles of Politics, Money, and Liberalization (joint with Scott Miller)

Regulatory Costs of Being Public: Evidence from Bunching Estimation (joint with Michael Ewens and Kairong Xiao) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3740722 Many disclosure and internal governance regulations for U.S. public firms trigger when a firm's public float exceeds a threshold. Consistent with firms seeking to avoid costly regulation, we document significant bunching around multiple…

Securities Lending and Trading by Active and Passive Funds Abstract I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment…

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Global Implications of Manager Disclosure (joint with Richard Evans, Miguel Ferreira, and Pedro Matos)

Revisiting Roll's R2 Puzzle (with Brent Kitchens and Chris Yung) Abstrac: We resolve Roll's R2 puzzle. Before legislation enacted to prevent such practices, information leakage through selective disclosure could be incorporated into market prices prior to public release of news. I.e., "news days" did not deliver news to the stock…

Crowded out from the Beginning: Impact of Government Debt on Corporate Financing Cagri Akkoyun, Nuri Ersahin, & Christopher James March 22, 2021 Abstract Using hand-collected data on corporate bond and stock offerings, we identify the impact of government debt on corporate financing during World War I. The early twentieth century…

"Why are firm growth distributions fat-tailed?"

Zoom link: https://darden-virginia.zoom.us/j/96249829459. Decarbonizing Institutional Investor Portfolios by Vaska Atta-Darkua, Simon Glossner, Philipp Krueger, Pedro Matos Combining global data on institutional investors’ equity holdings and firm-level carbon emissions, we study whether and how climate-conscious institutions reduce the carbon emissions of their equity portfolios. We find that institutions actively decarbonized their…

Foreign Investors and US Treasuries Alexandra M. Tabova & Francis E. Warnock We build, from confidential security-level surveys, a novel dataset on the size, flows, coupon payments, and returns of the US Treasuries portfolios of foreign and US investors. The internally consistent dataset provides evidence on foreigners’ Treasuries portfolios that…

Inflation and the Relative Price Premium Abstract This study shows that relative price dispersion impacts risk premia. Notably, firms associated with goods and services that have increased (decreased) in price relative to the headline inflation rate earn high (low) returns. We refer to this return spread of 0.71% per month…

The Effect of Childcare Access on Women’s Careers and Firm Performance  Abstract We study the effect of government-subsidized childcare on women's career outcomes and firm performance using linked tax filing data. Exploiting a universal childcare reform in Quebec in 1997 and the variation in its timing relative to childbirth across…