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October 2018
Elisabeth Kempf – Chicago Booth
"Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts" ABSTRACT Partisan bias affects the decisions of financial analysts. Using a novel hand-collected dataset that links credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts who do not support the President’s party are more likely to downgrade firms. Our…
Find out more »Xin Xue – UVa Econ – Brown Bag Series
Lending Platforms’ Information Aggregation under Competition I examine how lending platforms use their information advantage to deter adverse selection in their competition for creditworthy borrowers. Using data from peer-to-peer lending platforms and a platform entry event which exogenously in-duces platform competition for both borrowers and lenders, I find that the…
Find out more »November 2018
Robin Greenwood – HBS
The Impact of Pensions and Insurance on Global Yield Curves Abstract: We document a strong effect of pension and insurance company (P&I) assets on the long end of the yield curve. Using data for 26 countries, the yield spread between 30-year and 10-year government bond yields is negatively related to…
Find out more »Ting Xu – Darden – Brown Bag Series
Multi-Class Shares Around the World: The Role of Institutional Investors Jinhee Kim Pedro Matos* Ting Xu November 2018 Abstract This paper examines multi-class share structures around the world. Using a comprehensive sample of publicly listed firms in 45 countries over the period 2001–2016, we find that institutional investors exhibit strong…
Find out more »UVIC 2018
The 11th annual University of Virginia Investing Conference (UVIC) will take place at UVA’s Darden School of Business, 8-9 November 2018. The conference provides the reflection on the 10th anniversary of the Global Financial Crisis of financial analysts, portfolio managers, economists, and industry executives and speaks to professional investment managers,…
Find out more »Don Bowen – Virginia Tech – Brown Bag Series
Technological Disruptiveness and the Evolution of IPOs and Sell-Outs Donald Bowen, Laurent Fresard, and Gerard Hoberg September 19, 2018 ABSTRACT We show that the recent decline in IPOs in U.S. markets is explained by changes in the technological disruptiveness of startups, which we measure using textual analysis of patents from…
Find out more »Gill Segal – UNC
Production Networks and Stock Returns: The Role of Vertical Creative Destruction We study the relation between firms' risk and their upstreamness in a production network. Empirically, firms' average stock returns and productivity exposures increase monotonically with their upstreamness. We quantitatively explain these novel facts using a multi-layer general equilibrium model.…
Find out more »Markus Baldauf – UBC
Contracting for Financial Execution Financial contracts often specify reference prices whose values are undetermined at the time of contracting, which makes them prone to manipulation. To study such situations, we introduce a stylized model of financial contracting between a client, who wishes to trade a large position, and her broker.…
Find out more »December 2018
Stefan Thurner – Medical University of Vienna – Brown Bag Series
Eliminating Systemic Risk in Financial Markets Stefan Thurner Systemic risk in financial markets arises—to an important extent—from the interconnectedness of agents via financial contracts. We show that the systemic risk level of every player in a financial system can be quantified by simple network measures. Using central bank data from…
Find out more »Yufeng Wu – UIUC
Managerial Control Benefits and Takeover Market Efficiency How and to what extent do managerial control benefits shape the efficiency of the takeover market? We revisit this question by estimating both the dark and bright sides of managerial control benefits in an industry equilibrium model. On the dark side, managers’ private…
Find out more »Sheisha Kulkarni – UC Berkeley / UVA Economics
Removing the Fine Print: Standardization, Disclosure, and Consumer Outcomes Consumers face a choice when evaluating financial contracts: study the fine print and incur a cognitive cost or ignore it and risk costly surprises in future. We use a pair of policy changes in Chile to contrast two measures to protect…
Find out more »February 2019
Philipp Krüger – University of Geneva – Brown Bag Series
The Importance of Climate Risks for Institutional Investors According to our survey regarding climate-risk perceptions, institutional investors believe these risks have financial implications for their portfolio firms and that the risks have already begun to materialize, particularly regulatory risks. Many of the investors, especially the long-term, larger and ESG-oriented investors,…
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