Essays on capital market

Abstract

This thesis consists of three essays, each focusing on a different capital market: the stock market, the corporate loan market, and the mutual fund market. The first essay explores how retail investors alter their trading behaviors after learning about nearby jackpot winning events. Using lottery jackpot winnings around the neighborhood as exogenous shocks, we find that retail investors, whose brokers’ branches are located close to the lottery stores selling jackpot-winning tickets, buy more stocks than their counterparts after the shocks. The aggressive stock purchases lead to relatively lower returns. To pin down the mechanisms, we use a survey and identify that the emotions of salient gambling and feeling lucky drive our main finding. Moreover, these investors tend to buy more lottery-like stocks, and their selling decisions are unaffected. Finally, we perform several falsification tests and robustness checks and find consistent results. The second essay discloses the tacit collusion among top banks in the corporate loan market. While there is no apparent reason for loan spreads to cluster at certain numbers, we find that around 70% of bank loans have round-yard spreads (i.e., multiples of 25 basis points). We hypothesize that dominant banks implicitly collude by using the round-yards as focal pricing points when negotiating with their borrowers. The tacit collusion leads to higher spreads and total costs of the round-yard-priced loans than non-round-yard-priced loans. Consistent with our tacit collusion hypothesis, dominant banks round up rather than round down loan spreads to multiples of yards. Moreover, round-yard pricing is more prevalent among lower-quality and non-repeat borrowers. The third essay examines the effects of board gender diversity on mutual fund behavior. We show that funds with more female independent directors have a lower probability of involving in trading scandals. Gender diversity also reduces the intensity of intra-year risk-shifting by mid-year losers and cuts those funds’ underperformance substantially in the quarter following risk-shifting. Instrumenting gender diversity of mutual fund boards with a diversity of directors from non-local firms yields qualitatively similar results. We also find evidence that women directors are more likely to cut advisory fees than male directors.