Detractors have warned that Private Equity (PE) funds tend to over-lever their portfolio companies because of an option-like payoff, building up default risk and debt overhang. This paper argues PE-ownership leads to substantially higher levels of optimal (value-maximizing) leverage, by reducing...

We document the importance of a financial sponsor when a borrower violates a covenant, providing creditors the opportunity to enforce debt contracts. We identify private-equity (PE) sponsored borrowers in the Shared National Credit Program (SNC) data and find PE-sponsored borrowers violate...

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

We measure the liquidity profile of open-end mutual funds using the sensitivity of their daily returns to aggregate liquidity. We study how this sensitivity changes around real-activity macroeconomic announcements that reveal large surprises about the state of the economy and after three...

Since the financial crisis, the markets for Bank Loan (BL) and High Yield Bond (HYB) mutual funds (MFs) have grown significantly, with assets under management increasing from $19 billion and $75 billion to close to $117 billion and $225 billion, respectively, as of December 2018. This short...

We provide novel evidence that hedge fund performance is persistent following weak hedge fund markets, but is not persistent following strong markets. Specifically, we construct two performance measures, DownsideReturns and UpsideReturns, conditioned on the level of overall hedge fund sector...

We study the links between monetary policy and mutual fund flows, and the potential risks to financial stability that might arise from such flows, using data over the 2000-14 period. We find that monetary policy can have a direct influence on the allocation decisions of mutual fund investors. In...

This paper investigates whether mutual fund families acting as service providers in 401(k) plans display favoritism toward their own affiliated funds. Using a hand-collected dataset on the menu of investment options offered to plan participants, we show that fund deletions and additions are less...

Vector autoregressions with Markov-switching parameters (MS-VARs) fit the data better than do their constant-parameter predecessors. However, Bayesian inference for MS-VARs with existing algorithms remains challenging. For our first contribution, we show that Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)...

In 2005, Prosper launched the first peer-to-peer lending website in the US, allowing for consumers to apply for and receive loans entirely online. To understand the effect of this new credit source, we match application-level data from Prosper to credit bureau data. Post application, borrowers'...