Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

We investigate how information processing frictions contribute to household suboptimal saving and investment behavior. We find that 60% of open accounts in college 529 savings plans are invested suboptimally due to high expenses and tax inefficiency. Such investments yield an expected loss of 9%...

In recent years, assets of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) have grown significantly relative to those of banks. These two sectors are commonly viewed either as operating in parallel, performing different activities, or as substitutes, performing substantially similar activities, with...

We analyze the effect of a major central bank digital currency (CBDC) - the digital euro - on the payment industry to find remarkably heterogeneous effects. Stock prices of U.S. payment firms decrease, while stock prices of European payment firms increase in response to positive announcements on...

The traditional model of bank-led financial intermediation, where banks issue demandable deposits to savers and make informationally sensitive loans to borrowers, has seen a dramatic decline since 1970s. Instead, private credit is increasingly intermediated through arms-length transactions, such...

This paper studies a form of liquidity risk that we call 'Liquidity After Solvency Hedging' or "LASH" risk. Financial institutions take LASH risk when they hedge against solvency risk, using strategies that require liquidity when the solvency of the institution improves. We focus on LASH risk...

China's financial system has been integral to its spectacular economic growth over the past 40 years. We review the recent literature on China's financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of Aggregate Financing to the Real Economy (AFRE), a broad measure...

Using tax filings from 374,351 U.S. nonprofit organizations from 2008 to 2020, we provide the first large-scale analysis of endowment prevalence, function, asset allocation, and returns. Endowment use varies systematically across sectors and revenue models. Organizations with endowments scale...

General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...