This study provides an empirical analysis of the impact of Wisconsin and Ohio pension cut legislation on values of banks operating in Wisconsin and Ohio, banks operating in other states in which pension cut legislation was being considered as Wisconsin and Ohio went through its legislative...

We study the impact of interest rates changes on both the demand for and supply of new light vehicles in an environment where consumers and manufacturers face their own interest rates. An increase in the consumers' interest rate raises their cost of financing and thus lowers the demand for new...

This paper studies the sensitivity of investment in apartment building maintenance to building debt levels. I use a novel data set combining housing code violations from forty-five U.S. cities with apartment financing information to show that highly leveraged buildings tend to be less well...

We argue that buyout waves form in response to fluctuations in aggregate discount rates. In our model, discount rates alter the present value of cash flow improvements and the illiquidity premium demanded by buyout investors. We confirm our predictions empirically. Overall deal activity varies...

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...

This paper uses Hansen and Jagannathan's (1991) volatility bounds to evaluate models with idiosyncratic consumption risk. I show that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have CRRA preferences and the distribution of the idiosyncratic shock is...

Do investors confuse the quality of a firm with its attractiveness as an investment? If so, shares of well-run companies will be bid up too high and subsequently earn negative abnormal returns. Our analysis of Fortune magazine's annual survey of quot;America's Most Admired Companiesquot; for...

We show that inflation risk is priced in stock returns and that inflation risk premia in the cross-section and the aggregate market vary over time, even changing sign as in the early 2000s. This time variation is due to both price and quantities of inflation risk changing over time. Using a...

While both size and complexity are important for the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), specific types of complexity and their patterns across banks are not well understood. We introduce a range of measures of organizational, business, and geographic complexity. Comparing 2007 with...

We examine how professional traders behave in two financial market experiments; we contrast professional traders' behavior to that of undergraduate students, the typical experimental subject pool. In our first experiment, both sets of participants trade an asset over multiple periods after...