In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because they are opaque, i.e., their payoff-relevant signals are noisy, or because they are fundamentally risky, i.e., the variance of the prior is high. When interest rates are low (high), investors favor opaque (transparent) projects that...

Options should play an important role in asset allocation. They allow for kernel spanning and provide access to additional (priced) risk factors such as stochastic volatility and negative jumps. Unfortunately, traditional methods of asset allocation (e.g. mean-variance optimization) are not...

There has been a long dispute about the relative importance of country versus industry diversification. We test the hypothesis that institutional ownership affects the relative importance of country and industry effects in explaining stock returns worldwide. We find that industry effects become...

This study is motivated by the China puzzle: the very impressive post-reform growth with relatively low aggregate volatility in the absence of healthy financial institutions by international standards. We argue that political economy constraints on the reform process have made China‟s...

Bank runs and banking crises have become global phenomena occurring repeatedly in both developed and developing countries during the last few decades. Bank runs and banking crises have increased since financial liberalization in the 1980?s and 1990?s (Davis and Karim, 2007). In Indonesia, bank...

This paper investigates the return linkages and volatility transmission between oil and stock markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries over the recent period 2005-2010. We employ a recent generalized VAR-GARCH approach which allows for transmissions in return and volatility. In...

In a recent paper, Geanakoplos and Fostel (2008) suggest that financial markets operate under three conditions: the normal economy, when the liquidity wedge is small and leverage is high; the anxious economy, when the liquidity wedge is big, leverage is curtailed and the general public is...