Do credit contractions trigger social unrest? To answer this question, we turn to a natural experiment from 1930s China, where the 1933 U.S. Silver Purchase program acts as a shock to bank lending. We assemble a hand-collected data set of loan contracts between banks and firms, labor unrest episodes, and underground Communist Party penetration. The Silver Purchase shock results in a severe credit contraction, and firms borrowing from banks with a larger exposure to it experience increased labor unrest and Communist Party penetration among their workers. These findings contribute to understanding the socio-political consequences of credit shocks.
参考文献：Fabio Braggion, Alberto Manconi, Haikun Zhu, Credit and social unrest: Evidence from 1930s China, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 295-315,
2、成熟的投资者和市场效率:来自一个自然实验的证据
Sophisticated investors and market efficiency: Evidence from a natural experiment
We study how sophisticated investors, when faced with shocks to information environment, change their information acquisition and trading behavior, and how these changes in turn affect market efficiency. We find that, after exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures and mergers of brokerage firms, hedge funds scale up information acquisition, trade more aggressively, and earn higher abnormal returns on the affected stocks. The hedge fund participation also mitigates the impairment of market efficiency caused by coverage reductions. Overall, in a causal framework, our findings suggest a substitution effect between sophisticated investors and public information providers in facilitating market efficiency.
参考文献：Yong Chen, Bryan Kelly, Wei Wu, Sophisticated investors and market efficiency: Evidence from a natural experiment, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020,
3、金融稳定性的缺乏会影响货币政策的传导吗?
Does the lack of financial stability impair the transmission of monetary policy?
We investigate the transmission of central bank liquidity to bank deposits and loan spreads in Europe over the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We find evidence consistent with an impaired transmission channel due to bank risk. Central bank liquidity does not translate into lower loan spreads for high-risk banks for maturities beyond one year, even as it lowers deposit spreads for both high- and low-risk banks. This adversely affects the balance sheets of high-risk bank borrowers, leading to lower payouts, lower capital expenditures, and lower employment. Overall, our results suggest that banks’ capital constraints at the time of an easing of monetary policy pose a challenge to the effectiveness of the bank-lending channel and the central bank's lender of last resort function.
参考文献：Acharya, V. V., Imbierowicz, B., Steffen, S., & Teichmann, D. (2020). Does the lack of financial stability impair the transmission of monetary policy?
Journal of Financial Economics, 138(2), 342-365.
picture from Internet
4、有矛盾的投资建议比没有好吗?
Is conflicted investment advice better than no advice?
The benefit of investment advice depends on the quality of advice and the investor's counterfactual portfolio. We use changes in the Oregon University System Optional Retirement Plan to highlight the impact of plan design on the counterfactual portfolios of advice seekers. When brokers are available and target date funds (TDFs) are not, brokers help participants with high predicted demand for advice bear market risk, but they recommend higher-commission options. When brokers are removed and TDFs are added, new high-predicted-demand participants primarily invest in TDFs, which offer similar market risk but higher Sharpe ratios than the broker-advised portfolios within our sample.
参考文献：John Chalmers, Jonathan Reuter, Is conflicted investment advice better than no advice?, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 366-387
To assess the importance of inflation risk for nominal Treasury yields, a novel quadratic term structure model with time-varying inflation risk is estimated using survey-based inflation uncertainty. The resulting yield decomposition captures very diverse macroeconomic dynamics of inflation and real risk premiums (large and positive during the 1980s but small and negative post-2008) and generates sensible high-frequency estimates of expected inflation and real short rates over a long sample. The explicit link between the model-implied factors and macro fundamentals reveals that short- but not long-run fluctuations are unspanned by yields, consistent with an interest rate policy unresponsive to transient inflation shocks.
参考文献：Tomas Breach, Stefania D’Amico, Athanasios Orphanides, The term structure and inflation uncertainty, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 388-414
6、所有总统的朋友:政治访问和公司价值
All the president's friends: Political access and firm value
Using data on White House visitors from 2009 through 2015, we find that corporate executives’ meetings with key policymakers are associated with positive abnormal stock returns. We also find evidence suggesting that firms receive more government contracts and are more likely to receive regulatory relief (as measured by the tone of regulatory news) following meetings with federal government officials. Using the 2016 presidential election as a shock to political access, we find that firms with access to the Obama administration experience significantly lower stock returns following the release of the election result than otherwise similar firms. Overall, our results provide evidence suggesting that political access is of significant value to corporations.
参考文献：Jeffrey R. Brown, Jiekun Huang, All the president's friends: Political access and firm value, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 415-431
Corporate bond mutual funds engage in liquidity transformation, raising concerns among academics and policy makers that large redemptions will lead to asset fire sales. We find little evidence, however, that bond fund redemptions drive fire sale price pressure after controlling for time-varying issuer-level information that could also affect funds’ trading decisions, using a novel identification strategy that exploits same-issuer bonds held by funds with differing outflows. We attribute our findings, which contrast with those found for equity funds, to funds’ liquidity management strategies. Bond funds maintain significant liquidity cushions and selectively trade liquid assets, allowing them to absorb investor redemption risk without excessively liquidating corporate bonds, even during the 2008 financial crisis.
参考文献：Jaewon Choi, Saeid Hoseinzade, Sean Seunghun Shin, Hassan Tehranian, Corporate bond mutual funds and asset fire sales, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 432-457
8、战略交易和不可观察的信息获取
Strategic trading and unobservable information acquisition
We allow a strategic trader to choose when to acquire information about an asset’s payoff, instead of endowing her with it. When the trader dynamically controls the precision of a flow of information, the optimal precision evolves stochastically and increases with market liquidity. Because the trader exploits her information gradually, the equilibrium price impact and market uncertainty are unaffected by her rate of acquisition. If she pays a fixed cost to acquire “lumpy” information at a time of her choosing, the market can break down: we show that no equilibria exist with endogenous information acquisition. Our analysis suggests caution when applying insights from standard strategic trading models to settings with information acquisition.
参考文献：Snehal Banerjee, Bradyn Breon-Drish, Strategic trading and unobservable information acquisition, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 458-482
9、董事会结构、董事专业知识和外部董事的顾问角色
Board structure, director expertise, and advisory role of outside directors
We investigate how a shock to corporate demand for experienced directors (i.e., U.S. Congress’ grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations status to China in 2000) affects U.S. firms’ board structure and board advisory role. We find that firms appoint more outside directors with China-related experience after the grant. Firms with such directors realize higher returns around announcements of investments involving Chinese firms and better post-deal operating performance, particularly when these directors reside in the U.S. The appointment of directors with China experience is also greeted more positively by the stock market and they gain more board seats after the grant.
参考文献：Sheng-Syan Chen, Yan-Shing Chen, Jun-Koo Kang, Shu-Cing Peng, Board structure, director expertise, and advisory role of outside directors, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 483-503
This paper examines the joint determination of deviations in long-term covered interest rate parity and differences in the credit spread of bonds of similar risk but different currency denomination. These two pricing anomalies are highly aligned in both the time series and the cross-section of currencies. The sum of these two pricing deviations—the corporate basis—represents the currency-hedged borrowing cost difference between currency regions and explains up to a third of the variation in the aggregate corporate debt issuance flow. I show that arbitrage aimed at exploiting one type of security anomaly can give rise to the other.
参考文献：Gordon Y. Liao, Credit migration and covered interest rate parity, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 138, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 504-525
