We determine which macroeconomic variables other than inflation and real activity drive the yield curve using a no-arbitrage affine term structure models. We construct a model-based dynamic projection of all the latent factors onto the observable macro factors, which are real activity and...

We document that individual investor trading results in systematic and, more importantly, economically large losses. Using a complete trading history of all investors in Taiwan, we document that the aggregate portfolio of individual investors suffers an annual performance penalty of 3.8...

People are more willing to bet on their own judgments when they feel skillful or knowledgeable (Heath and Tversky, 1991). We investigate whether this 'competence effect' influences trading frequency and home bias. We find that investors who feel competent trade more often and have more...

One of the primary results of studying asymmetric information as part of information economics over the last 30 years has been a theory of markets for lemons - that is, markets for goods that are likely to be of poor quality. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to directly test the lemons...

We examine the effects of liquidity and information risks on expected returns of U.S. government bonds. Information risk is measured by probability of information-based trading (PIN) derived from the market microstructure model of Easley, Hvidkjaer, and O'Hara (2002). Liquidity risk is captured...

Many important classes of assets are illiquid in the sense that they cannot always be traded immediately. Thus, a portfolio position in these types of illiquid investments becomes at least temporarily irreversible. We study the asset-pricing implications of illiquidity in a two-asset exchange...

Variance contracts permit the trading of 'variance risk', i.e. the risk that the (squared) volatility of stock returns changes randomly over time. We discuss why investors might want to trade this type of risk, and why they might prefer a variance contract to standard calls and puts for this...

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention? To the curious incident of the investment in the market. The agent did nothing in the market. That was the curious incident. (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle.)In this paper we study an optimal timing problem for the sale...

We investigate the effects of information and diversification on cost of capital in a noisy rational expectations model. Assuming a factor structure for risky asset payoffs and two classes of investors, informed and uninformed, we show that in large economies the APT (Ross, 1976) holds and i)...

When consumption betas of stocks are computed using consumption growth from 4th quarter of one year to the next, the CCAPM explains the cross section of stock returns as well as the Fama and French (1993) three factor model. The CCAPM performance deteriorates substantially when consumption...