The Education-Innovation Gap Barbara Biasi and Song Ma May 17, 2022 Abstract This paper documents differences across higher education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the text of 1.7M syllabi  and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a syllabus’s relative  Read more…

All Clear for Takeoff: Evidence from Airports on the Effects of Infrastructure Privatization Abstract Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form—control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)—matter? We explore these questions in Read more…

Hidden Cost of Corporate Bond ETFs Abstract I document a hidden but substantial cost associated with the liquidity transformation that corporate bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide. When creating new shares, authorized participants (APs) deliver a subset of the portfolio of bonds that underlie a corporate bond ETF. This subset contains Read more…

Asset Demand of U.S. Households Abstract We use new monthly security-level data on portfolio holdings, flows, and returns of U.S. households to understand asset demand across multiple asset classes. Our data cover a wide range of households across the wealth distribution – including ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) households – and holdings in Read more…

Equity Term Structure Response to FOMC Announcements Abstract We study the response of the equity term structure to FOMC announcements using a high-frequency event study approach. We find that monetary policy surprises have opposite effects on short-term dividend strips and the long-term equity market. Following an unanticipated cut in the Read more…

Inflation and Disintermediation Abstract We test a bank credit channel through which unexpected increases in inflation lead to short-run macroeconomic fluctuations. For identification, we study an unexpected U.S. inflation increase in early 1977 and exploit differences in state-level reserve requirements for Federal Reserve nonmember banks, which create differences in banks’ Read more…

Are Banks Really Informed? Evidence From Their Private Credit Assessments Mehdi Beyhaghi, Cooper Howes, Gregory Weitzner Abstract In classic theories of financial intermediation, banks mitigate information frictions by monitoring and producing information about borrowers. However, it is difficult to test these theories without being able to observe banks’ private information. Read more…

Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions Abstract Approximately one-third of U.S. top executives receive bonuses explicitly tied to firm size measures like sales growth. We study how such “growth-promoting bonuses” influence firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities. We find that firms with such bonus structures are more prone to make Read more…