How does futures trading affect spot price volatility? This paper uses a unique early-twentieth century natural experiment to test what happens when futures trading no longer exists. In 1903, futures trading in the Viennese grain market was banned. The permanency of this ban makes it ideal for...

We investigate the behavior of commodity futures risk premia in China. In the presence of retail-dominance and barriers-to-entry, the term structure and momentum premia remain persistent, whereas hedging pressure, skewness, volatility and liquidity premia are distorted by time-varying margins...

Do equity investors care about pay dispersion and income inequality? We address this question by examining equity markets' reaction and investors' portfolio rebalancing in response to the first-time disclosure by U.S. public companies of the ratio of CEO to median worker pay in 2018. We find...

Enormous capital inflows into the emerging commodity futures markets in China raised concerns about the impact of speculation. Using a broad sample of 30 commodities across sectors, this paper investigates whether the increased presence of speculators in recent years destabilizes the commodities...

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

This paper examines the empirical literature on individual equity options, discussing results in areas of consensus, showing findings in areas of disagreement and providing a guide for future research (especially highlighting analyses that cannot be performed with index options). Key topics...

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

Using administrative data from the U.S. Census, this study provides the first direct evidence on the positive effect of firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies on employee retention. Following an exogenous shock leading to deterioration in firms’ CSR policies, we find that...

The role of public sentiment in stock market volatility has recently become increasingly relevant. Twitter, in theory, offers an inexpensive way to measure real-time public sentiment. We take advantage of a natural experiment to assess the potential improvement that social media adds to forecast...

This paper investigates the risk and return properties of a trading strategy for the cryptocurrency market. The main predictive power for portfolio formation comes from a simple prospect theory model that only uses price information readily available. The dataset consists of a large body of...