Tyson Van Alfen

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

SIU faculty page

University of Kentucky

Utah State University

Utah State University

Real Estate Shocks and Financial Advisor Misconduct

Journal of Finance (2021)

We test whether personal real estate shocks affect professional misconduct by financial advisors. We use a panel of advisors' home addresses and examine within-advisor variation relative to other advisors who work at the same firm and live in the same ZIP code. We find a negative relation between housing returns and misconduct. We show that advisors' housing returns explain misconduct against out-of-state customers, breaking the link between customer and advisor housing shocks. Furthermore, the results are stronger for advisors with lower career risk from committing misconduct, and for advisors with greater borrowing constraints.

Dual Ownership as a Market Solution to Risk Shifting: Evidence from Loan Covenant Violations

Working Paper

We examine the the choices of creditors to simultaneously hold equity in the same underlying firm and posit that creditors may become "dual holders" as a rational response to heightened asset substitution risk. We find that, following a firm's violation of a covenant, creditors increase their equity position relative to other owners. This effect persists several quarters into the future and is concentrated among lenders and not bond holders. We also find that bond holders who also own equity reduce their bond exposure following violations. We do not see a similar effect for bond holders that do not own equity, suggesting a strategic reallocation for dual holders.

Managerial Myopia and Product Market Reputation: Evidence from Amazon.com Reviews

Working Paper

Using a novel dataset of customer reviews from Amazon.com, I study the impact of managerial myopia on product market reputation. Using exogenous variation due to the timing of CEO equity vesting events, I show that short-term incentive shocks predict declines in reputation. A changing product market lineup and a deterioration of existing products are two mechanisms through which reputation is affected. The effect is larger when the CEO has other short-term concerns and when the firm has a low reputation in the product market. However, higher advertising expenses mitigate the negative reputational effect among consumers. Using an alternative empirical methodology, I find that higher short-term ownership in the firm is also associated with declining product market reputation, while higher long-term ownership is associated with increasing reputation.

Political Transactions Around Company Filings

Work in Progress

Security Valuation

Undergraduate MBA

Working Capital Management

Undergraduate

Information Visualization

Undergraduate

Corporate Finance Seminar I

PhD

Investment Analysis

Undergraduate

Introduction to Microeconomics

Undergraduate

Applied Econometrics

MBA

Other Instructional Seminars

• Southern Illinois University Carbondale — 2019
• University of Kentucky — 2015, 2019

• University of Kentucky — 2019

Stata Packages

I am the author of two Stata packages:

This program dynamically resizes columns in Stata's data browser. It's annoying when you are trying to view your data and either the variable names or contents are truncated. Sure, you could manually determine the appropriate widths and format the affected variables each time. Or you could just run recol when needed.

Since its release in Feb 2022, this package has been downloaded ~1,300 times.

To install:

This program converts SIC codes to any of the Fama French industries. I'm sure everyone has those obnoxious lines of code to do this somewhere, but this should save you some space in your Stata code.

Since its release in July 2017, this package has been downloaded ~20,000 times.

To install:

Python Tutorial

I created this tutorial primarily for my students. It is a work in progress that I add to and update regularly. There are many other Python tutorials out there that are higher quality and more comprehensive (e.g., here and here). But this one has a more narrow focus on finance applications and a target audience of finance undergraduate students.