We study how retail savings products can share market risk across investor cohorts, thereby completing financial markets. Financial intermediaries smooth returns by varying reserves, which are passed on between successive investor cohorts, redistributing wealth across cohorts. Using data on euro...

Why do some firms enter a new sector by acquiring an existing company ("buy"), while others do so using their existing resources ("build")? Using a novel dataset constructed by merging French employer payrolls with commercial M&A datasets, we show that firms are more likely to buy when their...

Except for relatively short but intense episodes of high market risk, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) falls steadily after 2000 until almost the end of our sample period in 2017. The decrease has been such that from 2012 to 2017 average IR was lower than any time since 1965. The secular decline...

Banks are unique in that they combine the production of liquid claims with loans. They can replicate most of what FinTech firms can do, but FinTech firms benefit from an uneven playing field in that they are less regulated than banks. The uneven playing field enables non-bank FinTech firms to...

After a natural experiment is first used, other researchers often reuse the setting, examining different outcome variables. We examine the consequences of reusing an experimental setting using two extensively studied natural experiments, business combination laws and the Regulation SHO pilot. We...

We first provide evidence of some retail investors taking real trading (selling) decisions which are clearly sub-optimal even from an ex-ante perspective. We then show that these investors also exhibit stronger investment biases, namely, the disposition effect, underdiversification, preference...

We examine the labor market consequences for directors who adopt poison pills. Directors who become associated with pill adoption experience significant decreases in vote margins and increases in termination rates across all their directorships. They also experience a decrease in the likelihood...

A growing literature uses the Russell 1000/2000 reconstitution event as an identification strategy to investigate corporate finance and asset pricing questions. To implement this identification strategy, researchers need to approximate the ranking variable used to assign stocks to indexes. We...

Yes, most likely. The firm-level evidence on costly reversibility is even stronger than the prior evidence at the plant level. The firm-level investment rate distribution is highly skewed to the right, with a small fraction of negative investments, 5.79%, a tiny fraction of inactive investments,...

Increased availability of alcohol may harm individuals if they have present-focused preferences and consume more than initially planned. Using a nationwide experiment in Sweden, we study the credit behavior of low-income households around the expansion of liquor stores' operating hours on...