We analyze a six-factor model for Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, and swap rates and decompose swap spreads into three components: A convenience yield from holding Treasuries, a credit risk element from the underlying LIBOR rate, and a factor specific to the swap market. The convenience yield...

An important research area of the corporate yield spread literature seeks to measure the proportion of the spread explained by various factors such as the possibility of default, liquidity or tax differentials. We contribute to this literature by assessing the ability of observed macroeconomic...

We investigate the risk and return of a variety of trading strategies involving options on the Samp;P 500. Overall, we find that strategies that short options constitute very good deals. However, exploiting these good deals can be extremely difficult. Trading costs and margin requirements...

We analyze the effects that real-time domestic and foreign news about fundamentals have on the co-movement between stock returns of a small, open economy, Portugal, and a large economy, the United States. Studying co-movement between the US and a small, open economy helps overcome significant...

In this paper we investigate how the enactment and enforcement of insider trading restrictions affect the way in which information about acquisitions is released before the actual acquisition announcement. We analyze a sample with almost 19,000 acquisition announcements from 48 countries. We...

We explore the flow-performance interrelation of hedge funds by separating the investment and divestment decisions of investors using a regime switching model. We report three previously undocumented features in hedge fund data. First, we find a weak inflow-performance relation at quarterly...

This paper shows that some of the most prominent risk-based theories offered as explanation for the value premium are at odds with data. The models proposed by Fama and French (1993), Lettau and Ludvingson (2001), Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004), and Yogo (2005) can capture the cross section of...

This paper makes three contributions to our understanding of the price discovery process in currency markets. First, it provides evidence that this process cannot be the familiar one based on adverse selection and customer spreads, since such spreads are inversely related to a trade's likely...

This paper rationalizes momentum in a competitive market with information asymmetry and fixed transaction costs. The existence of a fixed cost per transaction faced by uninformed investors hampers information revelation through price and induces further adverse selection in quantity. The adverse...

We test whether short-sellers in U.S. stocks are able to predict future returns based on new SEC-mandated data for 2005. There is a tremendous amount of short-selling activity during the sample: short-sales represent 24 percent of NYSE and 31 percent of Nasdaq share volume. Short-sellers...