团队

We study whether access to local pollution information causes investors to make greener portfolio allocations, exploiting the rollout of air quality monitoring stations in India. Using a triple-differences framework on the trading records of 19 million investors, we show that retail investors’ holdings in “brown” stocks become more negatively related to local pollution after a nearby station appears. This effect is more pronounced on “alert” dates when air quality is reported to be harmful. The effect is strongest among tech-savvy investors likely “treated” by real-time pollution data, and younger investors, who may be more sensitive to environmental concerns.

We study how households understand and respond to monetary policy by exploiting the open auctions of early-stage crowdfunding and inferring individuals’ expectations based on their maximum requested interest rates. Using loan listings from Prosper, we find that borrowers adjust their willingness-to-pay interest rates in response to unexpected Federal funds rate changes, whereas anticipated shifts have negligible effects. These responses are more pronounced among high-income, high-credit-score borrowers; large loan applicants; and when Federal Reserve communication is transparent. The responses are highly asymmetric—Borrowers sharply lower rates during unexpected easing but resist increasing them during unexpected tightening. The results are robust to alternative specifications, including regression-discontinuity-in-time designs and alternative measures of monetary policy shock. Lenders also respond to policy shocks and counteract borrowers’ adjustments. Analysis of Robinhood data shows that retail investors mirror this behavior by reducing equity holdings after surprise rate hikes.

Working at home benefits entrepreneurs by lowering fixed costs and allowing them to engage in joint market and household production. We evaluate a large-scale reform in Singapore, the Home Office Scheme, that allowed business creation at one’s residential property and study whether home-based entrepreneurship spurs entrepreneurial activities. The difference-in-differences estimate shows that the reform led to a significantly higher level of business creation and the firms newly created in response to the reform had a higher survival rate. The effect is more pronounced for low-income female individuals and industries with high start-up capital, implying that financial constraints and nonpecuniary benefits likely drive the effect. The reform also encourages entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, and they open a larger business with a similar survival rate for their second firm. Overall, our findings suggest that the program effectively attracted more entry into self-employment without significantly lowering the average quality of the pool.

有见近年的健康科学研究发现空气污染影响心理健康和认知，我们亦尝试加以探讨空气污染会否加剧金融市场中的认知偏差。此研究是根据一间中国大型证券投资基金的专有数据，当中包括于247 个城市、超过 773,198 个账户的完整交易资讯。我们发现空气污染显著增加了投资者卖盈持亏的处置效应。同时我们探究了两项影响空气质素的外生变化，即强风导致空气污染大幅度消散及淮河政策，证明以上发现存在因果解释。研究亦指出调适心情可成为一项潜在的应对机制。