A central question in financial economics is how private information is incorporated into asset prices. A common method of measuring private information is the PIN measure, which uses statistical estimation of a sequential trade model of the trading process to estimate the probability of...

This paper develops a tractable real options framework to analyze the effects of asymmetric information on investment and financing decisions when firms require external funds to finance investment. Our analysis shows that corporate insiders can signal their private information to outside...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on corporate bond ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs). We find no evidence that Dodd-Frank disciplines CRAs to provide more accurate and informative credit ratings. Instead, following...

While most empirical analysis of prediction markets treats prices of binary options as predictions of the probability of future events, Manski (2004) has recently argued that there is little existing theory supporting this practice. We provide relevant analytic foundations, describing sufficient...

This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity-exporting countries. We show that the introduction of hedging instruments such as futures and options enhances domestic welfare through two channels. First, by...

Theoretically, corporate debt is economically equivalent to safe debt minus a put option on the firm’s assets. We empirically show that indeed portfolios of long Treasuries and short traded put options ("pseudo bonds") closely match the properties of traded corporate bonds. Pseudo bonds...

We study the effect of introducing a new security, such as a non-redundant derivative, on the volatility of stock-market returns. Our analysis uses a standard, continuous time, dynamic, general-equilibrium, full-information, frictionless, Lucas endowment economy where there are two classes of...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...