Join us to hear from Chuck Fang, Drexel University.  His presentation is titled, "Monetary Policy Transmissions through Bond Fund Flows".  Abstract: I show that bond mutual funds and ETFs (“bond funds”) amplify the bond market transmission of monetary policy. During monetary tightening, bond funds experience large outflows of return-chasing capital and scale down their bond holdings much more than traditional bond investors such as insurance companies. In the cross section of firms, in response to monetary tightening, those held more by bond funds experience greater yield increase, issue less debt, and contract more on equity payout or real investment. For identification, I use a shift-share instrument to capture plausibly exogenous variation in bond fund ownership coming from fund growth and portfolio scaling over long horizons. I show evidence that the secular rise of bond funds has significantly amplified the monetary sensitivity of aggregate bond yields and aggregate real investment.  The Clarence Tow Lectures in Finance Series brings high-profile researchers to Tippie College of Business to present to an audience of faculty, PhD students, and researchers from around the University of Iowa.

Join us to hear from Ben Marx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, presenting, "Disparities in Aid for Natural Disasters". Abstract: Private transfers of aid provide ex-post support to victims of risky events, but the social insurance value of these transfers depends on how they vary with severity of the event and victim characteristics. Using detailed daily data on donations to the American Red Cross, we study patterns of natural-disaster giving using a heterogeneity robust difference-in-differences estimator. After deadly tornadoes, donations are elevated for 10 to 15 weeks within a 200-mile radius of the affected area, and responses are increasing in tornado severity. The relative giving response is similar whether a tornado strikes a high-income or low-income area, but the dollar value of donations is steeply increasing in the income of the affected area. This disparity arises because higher-income sites are located near larger and higher-income populations and because the donation response decreases in the distance between donors and the affected area. These findings suggest a role for redistribution to offset regressivity that donors themselves did not intend. The Clarence Tow Lectures in Economics Series brings high-profile researchers to Tippie College of Business to present to an audience of faculty, PhD students, and researchers from around the University of Iowa.

Boli Xu is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Tippie College of Business. He will be discussing "Reserve Price Signaling with Public Information: Evidence from Online Auto Auctions."

Join us to hear from Yi Hao, University of Iowa.

Join us to hear from Huiyi Guo, Texas A&M University.

Join us to hear from Martin Grace, Temple University.