6/1/2017 — An experienced investment committee can put an institution on course to gain higher endowment returns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

5/30/2018 — We examine the link between endowment investment performance and the expertise of university board members. Harnessing detailed information on 11,019 members for 579 universities, we find that expertise in alternatives and larger professional networks are associated with higher allocations to alternatives and better investment results.

• KEYWORD(S):
• hedge funds
• infrastructure
• private equity
• real estate
• venture capital

2/2/2019 — Using a large database of U.S. equity position-level holdings for hedge funds, we measure the degree of securitylevel crowdedness. The crowdedness factor is related to downside “tail risk" as stocks with higher exposure to crowdedness experience relatively larger drawdowns during periods of market distress. This tail risk extends to hedge fund portfolio returns as the crowdedness factor explains why some funds experience relatively large drawdowns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• hedge funds

4/29/2022 — We examine the links between human capital and endowment investing. Harnessing detailed information on university endowments, we find that higher asset allocations to alternative assets accompany higher levels of human capital in the endowment’s investment process. Moreover, high levels of human capital are linked to larger returns, even on a risk-adjusted basis.

• KEYWORD(S):
• investments
• private capital

3/1/2021 — This paper examines the spillover effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on emerging market capital flows and asset prices. Affine term structure model estimates show that U.S. monetary policy shocks, identified with high-frequency Treasury futures data, represent revisions to expected short-term yields and term premia, especially during the UMP period. The policy shocks exhibit sizable effects on U.S. holdings of emerging market assets. These effects disproportionately manifest through valuation changes versus physical flows, are more pronounced for equity relative to bond markets, and are asymmetric between the quantitative easing and tapering periods, with flows more important during the unwinding.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business

4/29/2021 — We introduce a new framework that facilitates term structure modeling with both positive interest rates and flexible time-series dynamics but that is also tractable, meaning amenable to quick and robust estimation. Using both simulations and U.S. historical data, we compare our approach with benchmark Gaussian, stochastic volatility, and shadow rate models, where the latter enforces positive interest rates.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

10/17/2022 — Reliably detecting insider trading is a major impediment to both research and regulatory practice. Using account-level transaction data, we propose a novel approach. Specifically, after extracting several key empirical features of typical insider trading cases from existing regulatory actions, we then employ a machine learning methodology to identify suspicious insiders across our full sample.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• fintech
• machine learning

3/11/2020 — We evaluate the impacts of tax policy on asset returns using the U.S. municipal bond market. In theory, tax-induced ownership segmentation limits risk sharing, creating downward-sloping regions of the aggregate demand curve for the asset. In the data, cross-state variation in tax privilege policies predicts differences in in-state ownership of local municipal bonds; the policies create incentives for concentrated local ownership.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• tax

5/19/2022 — Using a proprietary dataset from 2016 to 2019, we find that order flows from foreign investors, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns in the Chinese market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• global business

5/1/2022 — Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees resembling out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to undiversifiable tail risk. We present a model in the context of the U.S. life insurance industry in which the regulatory framework incentivizes value-maximizing insurers to hedge variable annuity (VA) guarantees, though imperfectly, and shift risks into high-risk and illiquid bonds. We calibrate the model to insurer-level data and identify the VA-induced changes in insurers' risk exposures.

• KEYWORD(S):
• insurance
• strategy and entrepreneurship

12/29/2020 — What are the spillover effects when central financial institutions with dominant market shares simultaneously halt their liquidity creation and risk transformation roles? To shed light on this question, we build a novel, comprehensive dataset. Firms without a history of debt financing exhibit limited exposure to a systemic event. For firms that rely on external debt financing, their exposures are mainly driven by pre-existing connections to these central financial institutions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

10/20/2022 — Global risk and risk aversion shocks have distinct distributional impacts on emerging market capital flows and returns. In particular, we find salient consequences of these different global shocks for tail risk in emerging markets. Open-end mutual fund trading provides a key mechanism linking shocks facing global investors to extreme capital flow and return realizations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• emerging markets
• finance

2/9/2022 — We document that there is commonality in the loan fees that short sellers pay, and the common component of loan fees explains a significant amount of loan fee variation. While the top principal component of stock returns only explains 28.3% of their variation, we find that the top principal component of loan fees explains 45.6% of their variation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance