We provide direct evidence of leverage-induced fire sales contributing to a market crash using account-level trading data for brokerage- and shadow-financed margin accounts during the Chinese stock market crash of 2015. Margin investors heavily sell their holdings when their account-level...

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008-09, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became...

In 2021, the U.S. Treasury reduced Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) exposure to speculative mortgages. As a result, GSE purchases fell by about 20 percentage points. The policy reduced credit to speculative investors in housing, but increased credit to unaffected parts of the...

Recent theories suggest that both risk and mispricing are associated with commonality in security returns, and that the loadings on characteristic-based factors can be used to predict future returns. We supplement the market factor with two mispricing factors which capture long- and...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

We develop a model of asset price bubbles based on the communication process between advisors and investors. Advisors are well-intentioned and want to maximize the welfare of their advisees (like a parent treats a child). But only some advisors understand the new technology (the tech-savvies);...

This study analyzes the role that two psychological attributes--sensation seeking and overconfidence--play in the tendency of investors to trade stocks. Equity trading data are combined with data from an investor's tax filings, driving record, and psychological profile. We use the data to...

We examine how investor sentiment affects the cross-section of stock returns. Theory predicts that a broad wave of sentiment will disproportionately affect stocks whose valuations are highly subjective and are difficult to arbitrage. We test this prediction by studying how the cross-section of...