Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We study political influences on private banks receiving government funds.  Using spatial discontinuities associated with congressional district borders, we show that recipient banks of the 2008 TARP program increased mortgage and small business lending by 23-60% more in census tracts located just ...
Keywords: empirical, data, panel, fixed, effect, county, district, congress, policy, mortgage
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We test whether household wealth shocks affect professional misconduct by financial advisors. We use a panel of advisors’ home addresses and examine within-advisor variation relative to other advisors who work at the same firm and live in the same ZIP code. We show that advisors increase miscon...
Keywords: Financial advisors, Brokers, Financial misconduct, Fraud, Household finance, Real estate, bankruptcy
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We test the relation between probability weighting and household portfolio choice in a representative household survey, using custom-designed incentivized lotteries. On average, people display Inverse-S shaped probability weighting, overweighting the small probabilities of tail events. As theory pre...
Keywords: Household Finance, portfolio underdiversification, probability weighting, rank dependent utility, cumulative prospect theory, salience theory, household portfolio puzzles, stock market participation
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We develop a dynamic portfolio-choice model with illiquid alternative assets to analyze conditions under which the “Endowment Model,” used by some large institutional investors such as university endowments, does or does not work. The alternative asset has a lock-up, but can be voluntarily liqui...
Keywords: endowment model, portfolio choice, liquidity, modern portfolio theory, asset allocation, alternative assets
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

The advent of machine learning (ML) tools presents researchers with the possibility of using large and new datasets related to text and image repositories. In this paper, we document how a novel synthesis of three methods—(1) unsupervised topic modeling of textual data to generate a new measure of...
Keywords: machine learning, topic modeling, facial image recognition, CEO communication, topic entropy
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