團隊

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.

有見近年的健康科學研究發現空氣污染影響心理健康和認知，我們亦嘗試加以探討空氣污染會否加劇金融市場中的認知偏差。此研究是根據一間中國大型證券投資基金的專有數據，當中包括於247 個城市、超過 773,198 個賬戶的完整交易資訊。我們發現空氣污染顯著增加了投資者賣盈持虧的處置效應。同時我們探究了兩項影響空氣質素的外生變化，即強風導致空氣污染大幅度消散及淮河政策，證明以上發現存在因果解釋。研究亦指出調適心情可成為一項潛在的應對機制。