We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine over 140 years of risk and return of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies—momentum. We find that the momentum strategy has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns—a...

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

How does the trading behaviour of institutional money managers affect stock prices? In this paper we document a robust relationship between the net trade patterns of institutional money managers and long term equity returns. Examining quarterly data on US institutional holdings from 1983 to...

The dangers of shouting ``fire'' in a crowded theater are well understood, but the dangers of rushing to the exit in the financial markets are more complex. Yet, the two events share several features, and I analyze why people crowd into theaters and trades, why they run, what determines the...

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...

The paper investigates the impact of financial integration on asset return, risk diversification and breadth of financial markets. We analyse a three-country macroeconomic model in which i) the number of financial assets is endogenous; ii) assets are imperfect substitutes; iii) cross-border...

This paper provides a new look at the timing of mutual fund investors. We re-examine the relationship between investors' aggregate net flows into and out of the funds and the returns of the funds in subsequent periods. The negative relationship that we find (using monthly data of aggregate US...

The paper presents a two-country macroeconomic model in which the number of financial assets is endogenous. Imperfect substitutability of assets and international transaction costs give a comparative advantage to large markets, because of demand effects. Agents have more incentives to undertake...

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...