The authors study the impact of a powerful nonfinancial stakeholder--unionized workers--on the pricing of corporate debt. Firms in more unionized industries have lower bond yields. This relation is stronger in firms with weaker financial conditions and cannot be explained by the correlation of...

This article examines managerial ownership structure and at-issue yield spreads on corporate bonds. There is a positive relation between managerial ownership and borrowing costs, and this relation is weaker at higher levels of ownership. In addition, managerial stock options have a larger effect...

We study the determinants of capital income inequality in a general equilibrium portfolio choice model with endogenous information acquisition. The key elements of the model are heterogeneity in investor sophistication and in asset riskiness. The model implies capital income inequality that...

We document a growing polarization of investment strategies of institutional and individual investors in the US equity market since the 1990s. Institutional investors have been focusing more and more on active trading of individual securities, while individual investors have increasingly shifted...

How to evaluate a fund manager’s skill is a central question in empirical finance. Prior literature has defined skill as an ability to either pick stocks or time the market, at all times. We propose a new definition of skill as a general cognitive ability used in different ways at different...

What contributes to the growing income inequality across U.S. households? We develop an information- based general equilibrium model that links capital income derived from financial assets to a level of investor sophistication. Our model implies income inequality between sophisticated and...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We propose a new definition of skill as general cognitive ability to pick stocks or time the market. We find evidence for stock picking in booms and market timing in recessions. Moreover, the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in...</p>

Despite extensive disclosure requirements, mutual fund investors do not observe all actions of fund managers. We estimate the impact of unobserved actions on fund returns using the return gap, which is defined as the difference between the reported fund return and the return of a portfolio that...