Search-Based Peer Groups and Commonality in Liquidity

We examine search-based peer (SBP) groups proposed by Lee, Ma, and Wang (2015) and their relationship with commonality in liquidity. Our results confirm that SBP affiliation is a significant determinant of commonality in liquidity and, unlike market- and industry-commonality, SBP-commonality has been increasing over the past 15 years. We separate retail from institutional investor queries by tracing the IP locations of EDGAR searches. Our results show that retail investors are responsible for roughly 85% of the EDGAR searches that generate SBP groups. Overall, our study provides new evidence of a significant demand-side commonality associated with SBP affiliations.

Forward Guidance and Corporate Lending

We suggest that forward guidance, via publicly committing the central bank to future actions and creating associated expectations, fundamentally affects bank lending decisions independently of other forms of monetary policy. To test this hypothesis, we build a forward guidance measure based on the language used in the Federal Open Market Committee meetings and match this measure with syndicated loans. Our results show that expansionary forward guidance decreases corporate loan spreads and that this effect is stronger for well-capitalized banks lending to riskier firms. Forward guidance also affects nonprice lending terms, such as covenants, performance pricing provisions, and the loan syndicate structure. Additionally, banks tend to initiate new lending relationships with lower spreads after forward guidance issuance.

The Distress Anomaly is Deeper than you Think: Evidence from Stocks and Bonds

The distress anomaly reflects the abnormally low returns of high credit risk stocks during financial distress. Evidence from stocks and corporate bonds reinforces the anomaly and challenges rationales based on shareholders’ ability to extract value from bondholders, time-varying betas, lottery-type preferences, biased earnings expectations, and limits-to-arbitrage. Moreover, mispricing of distressed stocks and bonds is associated with excess investment and excess external financing. Potential real distortions are materially understated when assessed based only on equity mispricing. We emphasize the important role of corporate bonds in dissecting the distress anomaly, and show that the anomaly is an unresolved puzzle.

Experience Effects in Finance: Foundations, Applications, and Future Directions

This article establishes four key findings of the growing literature on experience effects in finance: (i) the long-lasting imprint of past experiences on beliefs and risk taking; (ii) recency effects; (iii) the domain-specificity of experience effects; and (iv) imperviousness to information that is not experience-based. I first discuss the neuroscientific foundations of experience-based learning and sketch a simple model of its role in the stock market based on Malmendier et al. (2020a, b). I then distill the empirical findings on experience effects in stock-market investment, trade dynamics, and international capital flows, highlighting these four key features. Finally, I contrast models of belief formation that rely on “learned information” with models accounting for the neuroscience evidence on synaptic tagging and memory formation, and provide directions for future research.

The Costs and Benefits of Liquidity Regulations: Lessons from an Idle Monetary Policy Tool

We investigate how liquidity regulations affect banks by examining a dormant monetary policy tool that functions as a liquidity regulation. For causal inference, we use a regression kink design that relies on the variation in a marginal high-quality liquid asset requirement around an exogenous threshold. We show that mandated increases in liquidity cause banks to reduce credit supply. Liquidity requirements also depress banks’ profitability, though some of the regulatory costs are passed on to liability holders. We document a prudential benefit of liquidity requirements by showing that banks subject to a higher requirement just before the financial crisis had lower odds of failure.

Do Country-level Creditor Protections Affect Firm-level Debt Structure Concentration?

We study the effects of country-level creditor protections on the firm-level choice of debt structure concentration. Using data from 46 countries, we show that firms form more concentrated debt structures in countries with stronger creditor protection. We propose a trade-off framework of optimal debt structure and show that in strong creditor rights regimes, the benefit of forming concentrated structures outweighs its cost. Because strong creditor protections increase liquidation bias, firms choose concentrated debt structures to improve the probability of successful distressed debt renegotiations. Firms with ex-ante higher bankruptcy costs, including those with higher intangibility, cash flow volatility, R&D expenses, and leverage exhibit stronger effects. Firms with restricted access to capital are also affected more. A difference-in-differences analysis of firms’ debt structure responses to creditor rights reforms confirms the cross-country results. Our findings are robust to alternative settings and a battery of robustness checks.