Insider trading during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study how corporate insiders benefit from information flows in their network of business contacts. I find that insiders at firms with activities in China sell more shares of their companies than...

Firms often broadcast commitments to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, but do these commitments reflect their internal practices? To find out, I introduce an inside measure of ESG practices from 10 million employee reviews via a word-embedding model. The measure predicts a...

This paper documents a strong connection between payment system and credit supply. The dual role of deposits as financing instruments for banks and means of payment for bank customers implies spillover effects of bank lending. After a bank finances loans with new deposits, the deposit holders'...

Using a sample of 3,964 bank mergers during the 1999-2016 period, we examine the differential effects of merger and local market characteristics on local small business lending through banks' dependence on soft information acquisition relative to technology driven lending. Mergers involving...

We propose a dynamic theory of banking where deposits play the role of productive capital as in the classical Q-theory of investment for non-financial firms. A key conceptual innovation of our theory is that the stock of deposits cannot be perfectly controlled by the bank. Demand deposit...

We study the long-run outcomes associated with hedge funds' compensation structure. Over a 22-year period, the aggregate effective incentive fee rate is 2.5 times the average contractual rate (i.e., around 50% instead of 20%). Overall, investors collected 36 cents for every dollar earned on...

This paper shows that currency momentum, which cannot be explained by carry and dollar factors, summarizes the autocorrelation of these factors. Carry and dollar factors are strongly autocorrelated and only earn significantly positive excess returns following positive factor returns. Currency...

New technology promises to expand the supply of financial services to small businesses poorly served by the banking system. Does it succeed? We study the response of FinTech to financial services demand created by the introduction of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We find that FinTech is...

For the last two decades, non-US firms have lower valuations than similar US firms. We study the evolution of this valuation gap to assess whether financial markets are less integrated after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). The valuation gap for firms from developed markets increases by...