Assistant Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Faculty Research Fellow, NBER
Email: valentin.haddad@anderson.ucla.edu
CV
Research
Information aversion, a preference-based fear of news flows, has rich implications for decisions involving information and risk-taking. It can explain key empirical patterns on how households pay attention to savings, namely that investors observe their portfolios infrequently, particularly when stock prices are low or volatile. Receiving state-dependent alerts following sharp market downturns such as during the financial crisis of 2008 improves welfare. Information averse investors display an ostrich behavior: overhearing negative news prompts more inattention. Their fear of frequent news encourages them to hold undiversified portfolios.
Banks' balance-sheet exposure to fluctuations in interest rates strongly forecasts excess Treasury bond returns. This result is consistent with optimal risk management, a banking counterpart to the household Euler equation. In equilibrium, the bond risk premium compensates banks for bearing fluctuations in interest rates. When banks' exposure to interest rate risk increases, the price of this risk simultaneously rises. We present a collection of empirical observations supporting this view, but also discuss several challenges to this interpretation.
The optimal factor timing portfolio is equivalent to the stochastic discount factor. We propose and implement a method to characterize both empirically. Our approach imposes restrictions on the dynamics of expected returns which lead to an economically plausible SDF. Market-neutral equity factors are strongly and robustly predictable. Exploiting this predictability leads to substantial improvement in portfolio performance relative to static factor investing. The variance of the corresponding SDF is larger, more variable over time, and exhibits different cyclical behavior than estimates ignoring this fact. These results pose new challenges for theories that aim to match the cross-section of stock returns.
We construct a new dataset tracking the daily value of life insurers' assets at the security level. Outside of the 2008-09 crisis, a $1 drop in the market value of assets reduces an insurer's market equity by $0.10. During the financial crisis, this pass-through rises to 1. We propose a theory of financial intermediaries as asset insulators to account for this pattern. The theory also rationalizes insurers' portfolio choices and liability structure. Finally, we document that insurers' market equity declined by $50 billion less than the duration-adjusted value of their securities during the crisis, illustrating the macroeconomic importance of insulation.
Poor financial health of intermediaries coincides with low asset prices and high risk premiums. Is this because intermediaries matter for asset prices, or simply because their health correlates with economy-wide risk aversion? In the first case, return predictability should be more pronounced for asset classes in which households are less active. We provide evidence supporting this prediction, suggesting that a quantitatively sizable fraction of risk premium variation in several large asset classes such as credit or MBS is due to intermediaries. Movements in economy-wide risk aversion create the opposite pattern, and we find this channel also matters.
We document extreme disruption in debt markets during the COVID-19 crisis: a severe price crash accompanied by significant dislocations at the safer end of the credit spectrum. Investment-grade corporate bonds traded at a discount to CDS; ETFs traded at a discount to their NAV, more so for safer bonds. The Fed’s announcement of corporate bond purchases caused these dislocations to disappear and prices to recover. We use these facts to evaluate potential explanations of the disruption. The evidence is most suggestive of an acute liquidity need for specific bond investors, such as mutual funds, leading them to liquidate large positions.
Episodes of booming innovation coincide with intense speculation in financial markets leading to bubbles — increases in market valuations and firm creation followed by a crash. We provide a framework reproducing these facts that makes a rich set of predictions on how speculation changes both the private and social values of innovation. We confirm the theory in the universe of U.S. patents issued from 1926 through 2010. Measures based on financial market information indicate that speculation increases the private value of innovation and reduces negative spillovers to competing firms. No commensurate change occurs in measures grounded in real outcomes.
(with Paul Huebner and Erik Loualiche)
NEW!
We develop a framework to theoretically and empirically analyze investor competition on financial markets. The classic view assumes that markets are very competitive: if a group of investors changes its behavior, other investors react such that nothing happens in equilibrium. Our framework quantifies the strength of the competitive response. We estimate a demand system of institutional investors in the US stock market accounting for two layers of equilibrium: how investors compete with each other in setting their strategies and how prices adjust to clear asset markets. We find that investors react to the behavior of others in the market: when an investor is surrounded by less aggressive traders she trades more aggressively. This reaction reduces the equilibrium consequences of changes in individual behavior by 50%. However, it also implies that the stock market is far from the competitive ideal. A consequence of this result is that the large increase in passive investing over the last 20 years has led to substantially more inelastic aggregate demand curves for individual stocks, by 15%.