Companies planning a private placement typically gauge the interest of potential buyers before the offering is publicly announced. Regulators are concerned with this practice, called wall-crossing, as it might invite insider trading, especially when the potential investors are hedge funds. We...

This paper features an analysis of the relationship between the volatility of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index and a sentiment news series using daily data obtained from the Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) provided by SIRCA (The Securities Industry Research Centre of the Asia...

We develop a new likelihood-based approach to sign trades in the absence of quotes. It is equally efficient as existing MCMC methods, but more than 10 times faster. It can deal with the occurrence of multiple trades at the same time, and noisily observed trade times. We apply this method to a...

Most stock exchange regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-2009 crisis byimposing bans or regulatory constraints on short-selling. Short-selling restrictions wereimposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often applied to different sets ofstocks and featured different...

We study the impact of private information on volatility in financial markets. We develop a comprehensive framework to investigate this link while controlling for the effects of both public information (such as macroeconomic news releases) and private information on prices and the effects of...

This paper investigates the importance of speed for technical trading rule performance for three highly liquid ETFs listed on NASDAQ over the period January 6, 2009 up to September 30, 2009. In addition we examine the characteristics of market activity over the day and within subperiods...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Financial Econometrics</I> (2012). Vol. 10, pages 354-389.<p> This paper considers spot variance path estimation from datasets of intraday high frequency asset prices in the presence of diurnal variance patterns, jumps, leverage effects and...</p></i>

We analyse daily lead-lag patterns in US equity and credit default swap (CDS) returns. We first document that equity returns robustly lead CDS returns. However, we find that the CDS-lag is due to <I>common</I> (and not firm-specific) news and arises predominantly in response to <I>positive</I> (instead of...</i></i>

We study risk and return properties of capital structure arbitrage strategies aiming to profit from temporal mispricing between equity and credit default swaps (CDSs) of companies. We find that capital structure arbitrage provides an attractive annualized return of 24.35% on invested capital....

This paper tests the policitcal dimensions of the presidential cycle effect in U.S. financial markets. The presidential cycle effect states that average stock market returns are significantly higher in the last two years compared to the first two years of a presidential term. We confirm the...