Dear Colleagues,
Abstract: We study how passive investing affects asset prices. Flows into passive funds raise dispropor-tionately the stock prices of the economy’s largest firms—even when the indices tracked by the funds include all firms. Passive flows also raise the largest firms’ return volatility the most, andraise the aggregate stock market even when they are entirely due to investors switching from active to passive. These effects arise because of the re-pricing of systematic and large firms’idiosyncratic risk. We estimate that passive investing caused the 50 largest US firms to rise 30%more than the US stock market over 1996–2020.
Abstract: Innovation booms occur frequently and are often fueled by easy financing that allows new technology firms to pay high wages that attracts skilled labor. Using the late 1990s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) boom as a laboratory, we show that skilled labor joining this new sector experienced sizeable long-term earnings losses. We trace these losses to skill obsolescence, that cannot be explained by either selection or the subsequent ICT sector bust. During the boom, capital flowed more to firms whose workers would ultimately experience a larger productivity decline. This suggests that financial capital can amplify the negative effects of labor reallocation into booming sectors on aggregate labor productivity.
Luca Regis
-- Luca Regis Associate Professor ESOMAS Department, University of Torino Collegio Carlo Alberto sites.google.com/view/lucaregis Office: +39 011 670 6065 www.carloalberto.org/lti