Ali K. Ozdagli

Financial Leverage, Corporate Investment and Stock Returns

This paper presents a dynamic model of the firm with risk-free debt contracts, investment irreversibility, and debt restructuring costs. The model fits several stylized facts of corporate finance and asset pricing: First, book leverage is constant across different book-to-market portfolios, whereas market leverage differs significantly. Second, changes in market leverage are mainly caused by changes in stock prices rather than by changes in debt. Third, when the model is calibrated to fit the cross-sectional distribution of book-to-market ratios, it explains the return differences across different firms. The model also shows that investment irreversibility alone cannot generate the cross-sectional patterns observed in stock returns and that leverage is the main source of the value premium.

The Transmission of Monetary Policy through Bank Lending: The Floating Rate Channel

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt to total assets. We show that a two standard deviation increase in the bank dependence of a firm makes its stock price about 25% more responsive to monetary policy shocks. We explore the channels through which this effect occurs, and find that the stock prices of bank-dependent firms that borrow from financially weaker banks display a stronger sensitivity to monetary policy shocks. This finding is consistent with the bank lending channel, a theory according to which the strength of bank balance sheets matters for monetary policy transmission. We construct a new database of hedging activities and show that the stock prices of bank-dependent firms that hedge against interest rate risk display a lower sensitivity to monetary policy shocks. This finding is consistent with an interest rate pass-through channel that operates via the direct transmission of policy rates to lending rates associated with the widespread use of floating-rates in bank loans and credit line agreements.We describe and test a mechanism through which outstanding bank loans affect the firm balance sheet channel of monetary policy transmission. Unlike other debt, most bank loans have floating rates mechanically tied to monetary policy rates. Hence, monetary policy-induced changes to floating rates affect the liquidity, balance sheet strength, and investment of financially constrained firms that use bank debt. We show that firms---especially financially constrained firms---with more unhedged bank debt display stronger sensitivity of their stock price, cash holdings, sales, inventory, and fixed capital investment to monetary policy. This effect disappears when policy rates are at the zero lower bound, which further supports the floating rate mechanism and reveals a new limitation of unconventional monetary policy. We argue that the floating rate channel can have a significant macroeconomic effect due to the large size of the aggregate stock of unhedged floating-rate business debt, an effect at least as important as the bank lending channel through new loans.

The distress premium puzzle

Fama and French (1992) suggest that the positive value premium results from risk of financial distress. However, recent empirical research has found that financially distressed firms have lower stock returns, using empirical estimates of default probabilities. This paper reconciles the positive value premium and the negative distress premium in a model that decouples actual and risk-neutral default probabilities. Moreover, in agreement with the data, firms with higher bond yields have higher stock returns in the model. The model also captures the fact that book-to-market value dominates financial leverage in explaining stock returns. Finally, the model predicts that firms with higher risk-neutral default probabilities should have higher stock returns, a hypothesis that can be tested using credit default swap premiums.

Entrepreneurship and Occupational Choice in the Global Economy

This paper studies the effects of trade costs and foreign competition on entrepreneurship. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the higher the trade costs, the smaller the fraction of entrepreneurs. This fact holds across countries and across industries within the United States. We develop a model where heterogeneous agents select themselves into being either employees or self-employed entrepreneurs in the spirit of \citet{lucas:78}. This, in turn, translates into intra-industry firm heterogeneity as in \citet{melitz:03}. Self-employed agents (firms) can also decide to enter into the export markets, subject to fixed and variable trade costs. The model delivers three basic predictions: (i) domestic self-employment increases with the trade costs of exporting from a foreign country to the home country, (ii) domestic self-employment increases with the trade costs of exporting to the foreign country, (iii) higher levels of self-employment are associated with a lower fraction of exporting firms. Our empirical work on inter-industry data for the United States corroborates these predictions of the model.

Monetary Policy Shocks and Stock Returns: Identification Through Impossible Trinity

This paper aims to identify the effect of monetary policy shocks on stock prices through the lens of Mundell and Fleming’s “Impossible Trinity” theo ry. Our identification strategy seeks to solve the simultaneity and omitted variable problems inherent in studies that focus on the effect of monetary policy on asset prices. Moreover, we use our identification strategy to test the hypothesis that stock prices of financially const rained firms are more responsive to monetary policy shocks. Our results so far do not support this hypothesis, which seems to contradict the financial accelerator theory presented in Be rnanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999)

On the Distribution of College Dropouts: Wealth and Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Risk

We present a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college degree in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After matriculating and taking some exams, students re-evaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may decide to drop out and start working. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are likely to drop out sooner than wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing explicit credit constraints.

Monetary Policy through Production Networks: Evidence from the Stock Market

We study the importance of production networks for the transmission of macroeconomic shocks using the stock market reaction to monetary policy shocks as a laboratory. We decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect and attribute 50 to 85 percent of the overall effect to the network effect. Large network effects are a robust feature of the data, and we document similar patterns in realized cash-flow fundamentals. A simple model with intermediate inputs predicts that the reaction of stock returns to shocks follows a spatial autoregression, which we exploit for our empirical strategy. Our results suggest that production networks are an important mechanism for transmitting aggregate shocks to the real economy.

Show Me the Money: The Monetary Policy Risk Premium

We create a parsimonious monetary policy exposure (MPE) index based on observable firm characteristics that previous studies link to how stocks react to monetary policy. Our index successfully captures stocks’ responses to both conventional and unconventional monetary policy. Stocks whose prices react more positively to expansionary monetary policy (high-MPE stocks) earn lower average returns. This result is consistent with the notion that high-MPE stocks provide a hedge against bad economic shocks, to which the Federal Reserve responds with expansionary monetary policy. A long-short trading strategy designed to exploit this effect achieves an annualized Sharpe Ratio of 0.77.

Business Complexity and Risk Management: Evidence from Operational Risk Events in U.S. Bank Holding Companies

How does business complexity affect risk management in financial institutions? The commonly used risk measures rely on either balance-sheet or market-based information, both of which may suffer from identification problems when it comes to answering this question. Balance-sheet measures, such as return on assets, capture the risk when it is realized, while empirical identification requires knowledge of the risk when it is actually taken. Market-based measures, such as bond yields, not only ignore the problem that investors are not fully aware of all the risks taken by management due to asymmetric information, but are also contaminated by other confounding factors such as implicit government guarantees associated with the systemic importance of complex financial institutions. To circumvent these problems, we use operational risk events as a risk management measure because (i) the timing of the origin of each event is well identified, and (ii) the risk events can serve as a direct measure of materialized failures in risk management without being influenced by the confounding factors that drive asset prices. Using the gradual deregulation of banks’ nonbank activities during 1996–1999 as a natural experiment, we show that the frequency and magnitude of operational risk events in U. S. bank holding companies have increased significantly with their business complexity. This trend is particularly strong for banks that were bound by regulations beforehand, especially for those with an existing Section 20 subsidiary, and weaker for other banks that were not bound and for nonbank financial institutions that were not subject to the same regulations to begin with. These results reveal the darker side of post-deregulation diversification, which in earlier studies has been shown to lead to improved stock and earnings performance. Our findings have important implications for the regulation of financial institutions deemed systemically important, a designation tied closely to their complexity by the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve.