The interplay between investors' demand and providers' incentives has shaped the evolution of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While early ETFs offered diversification at low cost, later ETFs track niche portfolios and charge high fees. Strikingly, over their first five years, specialized ETFs lose...

We study the effects of political uncertainty on commodity markets from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, commodity prices and inventories decline by 6.6% and 5.7%, respectively, and convenience yields increase by 1.9% in the quarter...

A growing literature uses the Russell 1000/2000 reconstitution event as an identification strategy to investigate corporate finance and asset pricing questions. To implement this identification strategy, researchers need to approximate the ranking variable used to assign stocks to indexes. We...

Over two decades, ETFs have become one of the most popular investment vehicle among retail and professional investors due to their low transaction costs and high liquidity, taking market share from traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds and index futures. Research has shown that in...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...

From 2010 to 2012, the relation between bank stock returns from European Union (EU) countries and the returns on sovereign CDS of peripheral (GIIPS) countries is negative. We use days with tail sovereign CDS returns of peripheral countries to identify the effects of shocks to the cost of...

Limited stock market participation can potentially explain the disconnect between international asset prices and macro quantities. An incomplete markets model in which risk sharing for stockholders is high, generates highly correlated equity returns and relatively smooth exchange rates. Risk...

We use days with tail sovereign CDS spread changes of peripheral countries to identify the effects of shocks to the cost of borrowing of these countries on stock returns of banks from other countries. We find that tail sovereign GIIPS CDS changes have an asymmetric impact in that bank stocks...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...

Embedding disasters into a general equilibrium production economy with heterogeneous firms induces strong nonlinearity in the pricing kernel, helping explain the empirical failure of the (consumption) CAPM. Our single-factor model reproduces the failure of the CAPM in explaining the value...