While gold objects have existed for thousands of years, gold's role in diversified portfolios is not well understood. We critically examine popular stories such as 'gold is an inflation hedge'. We show that gold may be an effective hedge if the investment horizon is measured in centuries. Over...

This paper investigates movements of market indicators of banking fragility, namely, Japan premium, stock prices, and credit derivative spreads of Japanese banks. Although the Japan premium in the euro-dollar market seemed to have virtually disappeared since April 1999, credit and default risks...

As barriers to international investment fall and technology improves, the cost advantages for a firm's securities to trade publicly in the country in which that firm is located and for that country to have a market for publicly traded securities distinct from the capital markets of other...

This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate contagion in financial markets. Our measure of contagion captures the co-incidence of extreme return shocks across countries within a region and across regions that cannot be explained by linear propagation models of shocks. We characterize the...

Over-the-counter (OTC) stocks are far less liquid, disclose less information, and exhibit lower institutional holdings than listed stocks. We exploit these different market conditions to test theories of cross-sectional return premiums. Compared to premiums in listed markets, the OTC illiquidity...

We provide empirical support for the conventional wisdom that there are times when optimistic investors tend to build their hopes into castles in the air, and pay a large premium over intrinsic value for stocks of firms in the early stages of their life cycles with perceived growth...

Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

We evaluate the importance of "Limits to Arbitrage" to explain profitability of momentum strategies. Specifically, when the availability of arbitrage capital is in short supply, momentum cycles last longer, and breaks in momentum cycles are shorter. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings...

Stock and Treasury bond comovement, volatilities, and their relations to their price valuations and fundamentals change stochastically over time, both in magnitude and direction. These stochastic changes are explained by a general equilibrium model in which agents learn about composite economic...

Using complete order books from the Korea Stock Exchange for a four-year period including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, we observe (not estimate) limit order demand and supply curves for individual stocks. Both curves have demonstrably finite elasticities. These fall markedly, by about 40%,...