Annual Review of Financial Economics - Volume 3, 2011

I was invited by the editors to contribute a professional autobiography to the Annual Review of Financial Economics. I focus on what I think is my best stuff. Readers interested in the rest can download my vita from the Web site of the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. I only briefly discuss ideas and their origins to give the flavor of context and motivation. I do not attempt to review the contributions of others, which is likely to raise feathers. Mea culpa in advance.

Finance is the most successful branch of economics in terms of theory and empirical work, the interplay between the two, and the penetration of financial research into other areas of economics and real-world applications. I have been doing research in finance almost since its start, when Markowitz (1952, 1959) and Modigliani & Miller (1958) set the field on the path to becoming a serious scientific discipline. It has been fun to see it all, to contribute, and to be a friend and colleague to the giants who created the field.

This review surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the causes and consequences of banking crises, and summarizes the lessons learned from policy interventions to resolve banking crises. Despite their different origins, banking crises display similar patterns. Their causes lie in unsustainable macroeconomic policies, market failures, regulatory distortions, and government interference in the allocation of capital; they are frequently characterized by boom-bust cycles in credit and asset prices; and they are generally resolved through large-scale government intervention. When not handled effectively and swiftly, banking crises tend to impose enormous costs to society by curtailing the flow of credit to the real economy. The article concludes with a review of proposals to enhance financial stability in an increasingly integrated financial system, which include making banking regulation more macroprudential—focusing on the cycle and systemic risk rather than the risk of individual banks—and improving market discipline by limiting explicit and implicit government insurance of bank liabilities.

Financial innovation has been both praised as the engine of growth of society and castigated for being the source of the weakness of the economy. In this article, we review the literature on financial innovation and highlight the similarities and differences between financial innovation and other forms of innovation. We also propose a research agenda to systematically address the social welfare implications of financial innovation. To complement existing empirical and theoretical methods, we propose that scholars examine case studies of systemic (widely adopted) innovations, explicitly considering counterfactual histories had the innovations never been invented or adopted.

The recent financial crisis has triggered a major rethink of analytical approaches and policy toward financial stability. The crisis has encouraged a sharper focus on systemic risk, the inclusion of a financial sector in macroeconomic models, a shift from a microprudential to a macroprudential orientation in regulation and supervision, and questions about whether price stability is a sufficient criterion to guide monetary policy. In the process, it has led to a rediscovery of the macroeconomic roots of financial instability. This review argues that this development is welcome but has not gone far enough. To substantiate this conclusion, the review documents this analytical and policy journey before suggesting a way forward.

Money markets offer monetary services and short-term finance in the capital market with the credit support of institutional sponsors. Investors finance money market instruments at low interest because their salability on short notice confers an implicit monetary services yield. Low interest attracts borrowers to money markets. The fragile equilibrium depends on collective confidence in the credit quality of instruments supplied to the market. Federal Reserve monetary and credit policies have influenced interest rates and credit intermediated in the money market, especially during the credit turmoil. Permissive regulatory rulings have allowed borrowers to take increasing advantage of low interest funding in money markets via securitization and structured finance—vastly increasing maturity, credit, and liquidity transformation through asset-backed commercial paper, repurchase agreements, and money market mutual funds. Funding in such instruments and runs on these instruments helped to create the credit cycle that culminated in the turmoil of 2007–2009.

This review empirically analyzes the expectations hypothesis (EH) in inflation-indexed (or real) bonds and in nominal bonds in the United States and in the United Kingdom. We strongly reject the EH in inflation-indexed bonds, and also confirm and update the existing evidence rejecting the EH in nominal bonds. This rejection implies that the risk premium on both real and nominal bonds varies predictably over time. We also find strong evidence that the spread between the nominal and the real bond risk premium, or the breakeven inflation risk premium, also varies over time. We argue that the time variation in real bond risk premia most likely reflects both a changing real interest rate risk premium and a changing liquidity risk premium, and that the variability in the nominal bond risk premia reflects a changing inflation risk premium. We estimate significant time series variability in the magnitude and sign of bond risk premia.

This review surveys the literature on the economics of mutual funds in general, and open-end mutual funds in particular. This mutual fund design has been very successful, though it carries risks that have recently been realized at large scales. It also frustrates the analysis of performance in ways only recently appreciated. Among the topics reviewed are tax efficiency, transactions costs, risk shifting, window dressing, governance, marketing, price setting, and concerns that arise at the family level.

The first mortgage-backed security (MBS) was issued in 1968. Thereafter, the MBS market grew rapidly with outstanding issuances exceeding $9 trillion by 2010. The growth in the MBS market was accompanied by numerous innovations such as collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and the emergence of private label alternatives to MBS issued by government-sponsored entities. We trace the evolution of the MBS market and we review debates surrounding such questions as whether the MBS market has reduced the cost of housing finance, whether the MBS market is a market for lemons, and what role, if any, MBS played in the run-up and subsequent decline of home prices during the decade of the 2000s. We also detail the evolution of models for MBS valuation as developed by academics and practitioners.

Over the course of a few decades, asset securitization has evolved into a vast and diverse financial instrument. Bases for the marketability of these securities are valuation and risk management techniques allowing for reasonable pricing formulas and hedging schemes. Therefore, a key issue is the modeling of cash flows of a portfolio of assets as well as the statistical modeling of uncertainties of such cash flows in the future. This article reviews some aspects of so-called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and related instruments. The modeling of underlying credit risks plays an important role in this context. As such, this review naturally has a special focus on the modeling of structured credit portfolios.

A central argument in the ongoing discussion about the fates of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the importance of the 30-year, fixed-rate, prepayable mortgage (FRM). The FRM has been held up as the gold standard in mortgage instrument design and as an essential element of the U.S. housing-finance system. Supporters of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac argue that a government guarantee eliminating credit risk is essential to ensuring the FRM remains the main instrument for housing finance. The FRM has benefits for the consumer through payment stability and the right to prepay the mortgage without penalty. But these benefits come at significant cost. The interest rate and prepayment risk in the FRM are costly and difficult for investors to manage. There is a premium for both the long term and the prepayment options that are paid by all users of the mortgage. The FRM causes instability in the mortgage market through periodic refinancing waves. The FRM can create negative equity in an environment of falling house prices. And the taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in losses backing the credit risk guarantees provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support securities backed by the FRM. International experience suggests that mortgage markets work fine without an FRM (only Denmark has an equivalent instrument). Borrowers rarely stay with the same mortgage for 15–30 years. Shorter-term fixed-rate mortgages would be less expensive than the FRM in most interest rate environments, particularly if lenders were allowed to charge prepayment penalties. The taxpayer is exposed to too much risk in supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to justify continued government support for a product for which the costs outweigh the benefits.

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are term insurance contracts written on traded bonds. This review studies the economics of CDSs using the economics of insurance literature as a basis for analysis. It is alleged that trading in CDSs caused the 2007 credit crisis, and therefore trading CDSs is an evil that needs to be eliminated or controlled. In contrast, I argue that the trading of CDSs is welfare increasing because it facilitates a more optimal allocation of risks in the economy. To perform this function, however, the risk of the CDS seller's failure needs to be minimized. In this regard, government regulation imposing stricter collateral requirements and higher equity capital for CDS traders needs to be introduced.

Modern payment instruments can be complex. Yet, many of these can be interpreted as a form of money or credit, which are rather primitive instruments. We use a simple model of a monetary economy to provide an overview of some of the fundamental questions in the literature on payments. Why do agents pay? What are the frictions that prevent or limit the use of credit arrangements? Why is fiat money valued? Why do money and credit coexist? Our simple model can address these basic and important questions, and can be extended to address a variety of issues related to payments.

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the assets of the firm. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the balance sheet management of financial intermediaries reveals that it is equity that behaves like the predetermined variable, and the asset size of the bank or financial intermediary is determined by the degree of leverage that is permitted by market conditions. The relative stickiness of equity reveals possible non-pecuniary benefits to bank owners so that they are reluctant to raise new equity, even during boom periods when equity raising is associated with less stigma, and hence smaller discounts. We explore the empirical evidence for both market-based financial intermediaries such as the Wall Street investment banks, as well as the commercial bank subsidiaries of the large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs). We further explore the aggregate consequences of such behavior by the banking sector for the propagation of the financial cycle and securitization.

This article reviews empirical capital structure research, concentrating on papers published since 2005. We begin by documenting three dimensions of capital structure variation: cross firm, cross industry, and within firm through time. We summarize how well the traditional trade-off and pecking order approaches explain these sources of variation and highlight their empirical shortcomings. We review recent research that attempts to address these shortcomings, much of which follows seven broad themes: (a) Important variables have been mismeasured in empirical tests, (b) the impact of leverage on nonfinancial stakeholders is important, (c) the supply side of capital affects corporate capital structure, (d) richer features of financial contracts have been underresearched, (e) value effects due to capital structure appear to be modest over wide ranges of leverage, (f) estimates of leverage adjustment speeds are biased, and (g) capital structure dynamics have not been adequately considered. Much progress has been made in addressing these issues, some of which has led to the study of an expanded range of capital structure topics, including debt maturity, loan and covenant characteristics, collateral effects, and alternative financing sources such as leasing and credit lines. We conclude by summarizing unanswered questions and areas for future research.

In this review, I criticize the ability of popular asymmetric information-based models to explain the magnitude of the underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) that is observed. I suggest that the quantitative magnitude of underpricing can be explained with a market structure in which underwriters want to underprice excessively, issuers are focused on services bundled with underwriting rather than on maximizing the offer proceeds, and there is limited competition between underwriters. Since the technology bubble burst in 2000, U.S. IPO volume has been low. Although regulatory burdens undoubtedly account for some of the decline, I suggest that much of the decline may be due to a structural shift that has lessened the profitability of small independent companies relative to their value as part of a larger, more established organization that can realize economies of scope. I also discuss the long-run performance literature. My interpretation of the evidence is that except for the smallest companies going public, IPOs have long-run returns that are similar to those on seasoned stocks with the same characteristics.

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a large business group, acting in its controlling shareholder's self-interest, coordinates the establishment and expansion of businesses in diverse sectors. Where business groups play this role, many basic axioms of Anglo-American corporate governance, including the advocacy of shareholder value maximization and contestable corporate control, must be qualified.

This review puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance. Microfinance aims to democratize global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the roles that government agencies and socially minded investors play in supporting the entry and expansion of private intermediaries in the sector, and we disentangle debates about competing social and commercial firm goals. We frame the analysis with theory that explains why microfinance institutions serving lower-income communities charge high interest rates, face high costs, monitor customers relatively intensively, and have limited ability to lever assets. The analysis blurs traditional dividing lines between nonprofits and for-profits and places focus on the relationship between target market, ownership rights, and access to external capital.

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both domestic and global risk factors. Further, local investors tend to overweight their asset portfolios in local equity. The stock prices of firms that begin to trade across borders increase in response to this information. Foreign exchange markets also display anomalous relationships. The forward rate predicts the wrong sign of future movements in the exchange rate, implying that traders can make profits by borrowing at lower interest rate currencies and investing in higher interest rate currencies. Furthermore, the sign of the foreign exchange premium changes over time, a fact difficult to reconcile with consumption variability. In this review, I describe the implications of the current body of research for addressing these and other global asset pricing challenges.

We review the literature on return and cash-flow growth predictability from the perspective of the present-value identity. We focus predominantly on recent work. Our emphasis is on U.S. aggregate stock return predictability, but we also discuss evidence from other asset classes and countries.