Open-end mutual funds have grown to become a key player in the corporate bond market. They invest in illiquid bonds but provide liquid claims to shareholders. Does such liquidity transformation introduce fragility to the corporate bond market? To address this question, we create a novel measure...

Both macroeconomic and firm-specific news contain value-relevant information for corporate bonds. In this article, we show that trading volume in corporate bonds spikes before the release of scheduled macroeconomic news but on the days with and after scheduled firm-specific news. Since investors...

Interest rates dived into uncharted territories for an extended period after the financial crisis. What is the impact on investor behavior and asset prices? We find that when interest rates fall, flows into income-oriented equity funds increase, with higher dividend-yielding funds attracting...

It is well known that the out-of-sample performance of Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio criterion can be negatively affected by estimation errors in the mean and covariance. In this paper we address the problem by regularizing the mean-variance objective function with a weighted elastic net...

This paper studies the joint distribution of tick by tick returns and durations between trades. Returns are decomposed into changes in full information prices and microstructure noise, but the noise is modeled in accordance with various models of market microstructure allowing rich correlation...

Between 2001 and 2007, annual institutional funding in highly leveraged loans went up from $32 billion to $426 billion, accounting for nearly 70% of the jump in total syndicated loan issuance over the same period. Did the inflow of institutional funding in the syndicated loan market lead to...