Asset Management

What is a good banker? What is the economic value added of banks? The economics literature on financial intermediation focuses on the role of banks as deposit-taking institutions and as delegated monitors of borrowers. But this description barely begins to represent what banks do in a modern economy. Besides commercial lending, large banks are engaged in a number of other activities ranging from cash management, trade credit, swaps and derivatives trading and underwriting of securities.

For generations, the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic families in the United States, primarily managed their assets in order to enrich the family as a whole, as opposed to generating wealth for individual family members. The Pritzkers were historically publicity shy, but their saga gained much media attention in the early 2000s when some family members questioned the asset distribution and leadership requests of their forefathers.

We analyze the role of retail investors in stock pricing using a database uniquely suited for this purpose. The data allow us to address selection bias concerns and to separately examine aggressive (market) and passive (limit) orders. Both aggressive and passive net buying positively predict firms' monthly stock returns with no evidence of return reversal. Only aggressive orders correctly predict firm news, including earnings surprises, suggesting they convey novel cash flow information.

We propose and estimate a structural model of daily stock market activity to test competing theories of trading volume. The model features informed rational speculators and uninformed agents who trade either to hedge endowment shocks or to speculate on perceived information. To identify the model parameters, we exploit enormous empirical variation in trading volume, market liquidity, and return volatility associated with regular and extended-hours markets as well as news arrival. We find that the model matches market activity well when we allow for overconfidence.

This paper studies the "confidential holdings" of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Funds managing large, risky portfolios with nonconventional strategies seek confidentiality more frequently. Stocks in these holdings are disproportionately associated with information-sensitive events or share characteristics indicating greater information asymmetry.

We study a dynamic-contracting problem involving risk sharing between two parties — the Proposer and the Responder — who invest in a risky asset until an exogenous but random termination time. In any time period they must invest all their wealth in the risky asset, but they can share the underlying investment and termination risk. When the project ends they consume their final accumulated wealth. The Proposer and the Responder have constant relative risk aversion R and r respectively, with R > r > 0.

This article derives and evaluates estimates of the implied cost of equity capital of U.S. insurance companies. During most of the period December 1981 through January 2010, the monthly median implied equity risk premium ranged between 4% and 8%, with a time-series mean of 6.2%. However, during the financial crisis of 2008–2009, the equity premium reached unprecedented levels, exceeding 15% in November 2008.