The paper develops a theory for equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium during the 1961-2014 period, and...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

We study liquidity transformation in mutual funds using a novel data set on their cash holdings. To provide investors with claims that are more liquid than the underlying assets, funds engage in substantial liquidity management. Specifically, they hold substantial amounts of cash, which they use...

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets. We conjecture that a financial market in which large institutions dominate operates differently than a market populated by smaller independent investors. To support this view, we show that funds within the same family...

We explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows, namely, U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). The...

Do financial markets properly reflect leverage? Unlike Gomes and Schmid (2010) who examine this question with a structural approach (using long-term monthly stock characteristics), my paper examines it with a quasi-experimental approach (using short-term a discrete event). After a firm has...

We introduce a reduced-form modeling framework for mortgage-backed securities in which we solve for the implied prepayment function from the cross section of market prices. From the implied prepayment function, we find that prepayment rates are driven not only by interest rates, but also by two...

Consistent with reduced expected corruption adding value overall, Chinese shares rise sharply on the December 4th 2012 launch of major anti-corruption reforms, which started by curtailing extravagant spending by or for Party cadres. SOEs gain broadly, consistent with the reform cutting their top...

Using over eight trillion observations of market data, we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze the effect of increasing the minimum price variation (MPV) for quoting equity securities in light of recent proposals to increase the MPV from $0.01 to $0.05. We show that a larger MPV...

Recent evidence of excessive comovement among stocks following index additions (Barberis, Shleifer, and Wurgler, 2005) and stock splits (Green and Hwang, 2009) challenges traditional finance theory. Based on a simple model, we show that the bivariate regressions relied upon in the literature...