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Working Paper
Sluggish news reactions: A combinatorial approach for synchronizing stock jumps
Stock prices often react sluggishly to news, producing gradual jumps and jump delays. Econometricians typically treat these sluggish reactions as microstructure effects and settle for a coarse sampling grid to guard against them. Synchronizing mistimed stock returns on a fine sampling grid allows us to better approximate the true common jumps in related stock prices.
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Marginal Propensity to Consume: Evidence from Covid-19 Stimulus Payments
We identify 16,016 recipients of Covid-19 Economic Impact Payments in anonymized transaction-level debit card data from Facteus. We use an event study framework to show that in the two weeks following a sudden $1,200 payment from the IRS, consumers immediately increased spending by an average of $577, implying a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 48%. Consumer spending falls back to normal levels after two weeks. Stimulus recipients who live paycheck-to-paycheck spend 68% of the stimulus payment immediately, while recipients who save much of their monthly income spend 23% of the stimulus ...
Working Paper
Estimation of the discontinuous leverage effect: Evidence from the NASDAQ order book
An extensive empirical literature documents a generally negative correlation, named the ?leverage effect,? between asset returns and changes of volatility. It is more challenging to establish such a return-volatility relationship for jumps in high-frequency data. We propose new nonparametric methods to assess and test for a discontinuous leverage effect ? i.e. a relation between contemporaneous jumps in prices and volatility ? in high-frequency data with market microstructure noise. We present local tests and estimators for price jumps and volatility jumps. Five years of transaction data from ...
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cellphone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, food delivery sharply increased after orders went into effect. Third, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer ...
Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior
We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cellphone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, food delivery sharply increased after orders went into effect. Third, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer ...
Report
The Bitcoin–Macro Disconnect
This paper investigates the link between Bitcoin and macroeconomic fundamentals by estimating the impact of macroeconomic news on Bitcoin using an event study with intraday data. The key result is that, unlike other U.S. asset classes, Bitcoin is orthogonal to monetary and macroeconomic news. This disconnect is puzzling as unexpected changes in discount rates should, in principle, affect the price of Bitcoin even when interpreting Bitcoin as a purely speculative asset.
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Marginal Propensity to Consume: Evidence from Covid-19 Stimulus Payments
We identify 16,016 recipients of Covid-19 Economic Impact Payments in anonymized transaction-level debit card data from Facteus. We use an event study framework to show that in the two weeks following a sudden $1,200 payment from the IRS, consumers immediately increased spending by an average of $577, implying a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 48%. Consumer spending falls back to normal levels after two weeks. Stimulus recipients who live paycheck-to-paycheck spend 68% of the stimulus payment immediately, while recipients who save much of their monthly income spend 23% of the stimulus ...
Report
The Price of Processing: Information Frictions and Market Efficiency in DeFi
This paper investigates the speed of price discovery when information becomes publicly available but requires costly processing to become common knowledge. We exploit the unique institutional setting of hacks on decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Public blockchain data provides the precise time a hack’s transactions are recorded—becoming public information—while subsequent social media disclosures mark the transition to common knowledge. This empirical design allows us to isolate the price impact occurring during the interval characterized by information asymmetry driven purely by ...
Working Paper
The response of multinationals’ foreign exchange rate exposure to macroeconomic news
We use intraday data to estimate the daily foreign exchange exposure of U.S. multinationals and show that macroeconomic news affects these firms? foreign exchange exposure. News creates a substantial shift in the joint distribution of stock and exchange rate returns that has both a transitory and a persistent component. For example, a positive domestic demand surprise, as reflected in higher-than-expected nonfarm payroll, increases the value of the low-exposure domestic activities and results in a persistent decrease in foreign exchange exposure.
Working Paper
Investing in the Batteries and Vehicles of the Future: A View Through the Stock Market
A large number of companies operating in the EV and battery supply chain have listed on a U.S. stock exchange in recent years. I compile a unique data set of high-frequency stock returns for those companies and investigate the extent to which an “industry” factor specific to the EV and battery supply chain (an “EV” factor) can explain their returns. Those returns are decomposed into systematic and idiosyncratic components, with the former given by a set of latent factors extracted from a large panel of stock returns using high-frequency principal components. It is found that a market ...