We distinguish between “good” and “bad” carry trades constructed from Group of Ten (G-10) currencies. The good trades exhibit higher Sharpe ratios and sometimes positive return skewness, in contrast to the bad trades, which have both substantially lower Sharpe ratios and highly negative return skewness. Surprisingly, good trades do not involve the most typical carry currencies like the Australian dollar and Japanese yen. The distinction between good and bad carry trades significantly alters our understanding of currency carry trade returns, and invalidates, for example, explanations invoking return skewness and crash risk.

Intermediation in private equity involves illiquid investments, professional investors, and high information asymmetry. We use this unique setting to empirically evaluate theoretical predictions regarding intermediation. Using placement agents has become nearly ubiquitous, but agents are associated with significantly lower abnormal returns in venture and real estate funds, consistent with investor capture and influence peddling. However, returns are higher for buyout funds employing a top-tier agent and for first-time real estate and venture funds employing an agent, and are less volatile for agent-affiliated funds, consistent with a certification role. Our results suggest heterogeneous motives for intermediation in the private equity industry.

We develop a tractable dynamic model of an index option market maker with limited capital. We solve for the variance risk premium and option prices as a function of the asset dynamics and market maker option holdings and wealth. The market maker absorbs end users’ positive demand and requires a more negative variance risk premium when she incurs losses. We estimate the model using returns, options, and inventory and find that it performs well, especially during the financial crisis. The restrictions imposed by nested existing reduced-form stochastic-volatility models are strongly rejected in favor of the model with a market maker.

We study the implications of predictability on the optimal asset allocation of ambiguity-averse long-term investors and analyze the term structure of the multivariate risk–return trade-off considering parameter uncertainty. We calibrate the model to real returns of U.S. stocks, long-term bonds, cash, real estate, and gold using the term spread and the dividend–price ratio as additional predictive variables, and we show that over long horizons, the optimal asset allocation is significantly influenced by the covariance structure induced by estimation errors. The ambiguity-averse long-term investor optimally tilts his or her portfolio toward a seemingly inefficient portfolio, which shows maximum robustness against estimation errors.

This article studies time variation in the expected excess returns of traded claims on dividends, bonds, and stock indices for international markets. We introduce a novel dividend risk factor that complements the bond risk factor of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). By aggregating over 4 regions (United States, United Kingdom, Eurozone, and Japan), we create global dividend and bond factors. Our global 2-factor model captures the excess returns of most Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) country indices, as well as a variety of other test assets. Our findings highlight the value of the information contained in dividend and bond forward curves and suggest substantial comovement in international risk premia.

We investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a nonlinear compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance. Using a unique data set provided by a large international commercial bank, we examine the main activities that loan officers perform: loan prospecting, screening, and monitoring. We find that when loan officers are at risk of losing their bonuses, they increase prospecting and monitoring. We further show that loan officers adjust their behavior more toward the end of the month when bonus payments are approaching. These effects are more pronounced for loan officers with longer tenures at the bank.

How do changes in banking regulation affect the syndicated loan market? Because branch networks and loan syndication both enable banks to diversify geographical credit risk, we investigate the staggered implementation of the Riegle–Neal Interstate Branching and Banking Efficiency Act of 1994. Exploiting that the act only changed the legal framework for out-of-state commercial banks, we find that branching deregulation decreased syndicated loan issuance but spurred bilateral lending to corporations. Consistent with a supply-driven substitution effect, this shift is also reflected in interest rate spreads. Our results suggest that changes to banking regulation can substantially alter credit allocation across loan types.

I examine the ability of the U.S. investor protection regime to limit insider trading returns, absent Section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the short-swing rule). I find that in this setting, U.S. insiders execute short-swing trades that i) beat the market by approximately 15 basis points per day and ii) systematically divest ahead of disappointing earnings announcements. These results indicate that the bright-line rule restricting short-horizon round-trip insider trading plays a substantial role in protecting outside investors from privately informed insiders in the United States.

I develop an analytically tractable model that integrates the risk-shifting problem between bondholders and shareholders with the moral-hazard problem between shareholders and the manager. An optimal contract binds shareholders and the manager, and this contract’s flexibility allows shareholders to relax the manager’s incentive constraint following a “good” profitability shock. Thus, the optimal contract amplifies the upside and thereby increases shareholder appetite for risk shifting. Whereas some empirical studies find a positive relation between risk shifting and leverage, others find a negative relation. This model predicts a non-monotonic relation between risk shifting and leverage and can reconcile these contradictory empirical findings.

Using country- and institution-level data, we find that the “coming wave” of emerging- market (EM) investors systematically over- or underweight their equity portfolio holdings in a way that reflects the influences of past capital and trade flows from a foreign country. We interpret this finding as support for van Nieuwerburgh and Veldkamp (2009) information endowment hypothesis. Strong past capital and trade flows create an information advantage that leads EM investors to disproportionately overweight a given foreign market, even relative to developed market investor counterparts. We also pursue predictions of the information endowment hypothesis by constructing novel information-advantage proxies based on relationships among investment firms and the headquarters of their parent companies. These proxies also offer reliable explanatory power for international portfolio allocations.