This study examines some of the economic consequences associated with the public school reforms introduced in New York City (NYC) by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, including their impact on housing values. The reforms focused primarily on increasing the autonomy and accountability of a school's...

This paper studies the effect of adding space to existing housing apartments on housing price and the probability that owners will sell their apartment (flat). This space adding is part of a large scale urban renewal and upgrading policy in Singapore, and is carried out only if sufficient...

This paper examines relational contracts (RCs) in the housing market that exist between lenders and appraisers. We document that 42% of appraisals are at or near the contract value, while only 7.5% are below the contract. We develop an RC model and test several predictions using a novel data set...

This paper investigates the role of ethnic matching between buyers and sellers in housing markets. Using unique public housing datasets in Singapore, we find that sellers sell homes in blocks with a high concentration of their own (other) ethnic group at significant premiums (discounts). Chinese...

We investigate the effects of environmental regulations on housing markets using a quasi-experiment—the NOx Budget Trading Program (NBP). Hedonic theory predicts that house prices should rise as pollution levels decrease. However, environmental regulations may also affect labor markets, and...

We investigate whether the distributional characteristics of corporate bonds predict the cross-sectional differences in future bond returns. The results indicate a significantly positive (negative) link between volatility (skewness) and expected returns, whereas kurtosis does not make a robust...

This is the first study on the risk-neutral distribution of option returns. We derive solutions for the risk-neutral variance, skewness, and kurtosis of call and put option returns and document several properties of these ex-ante moments. We find that the volatility, skewness, and kurtosis of...

We develop an ex-ante measure of expected stock returns based on analyst price targets. We then show that ex-ante measures of volatility, skewness, and kurtosis implied from stock option prices are positively related to the cross section of ex-ante expected stock returns. While expected returns...

This paper shows that firm growth potential – representing a firm's yet-unexercised growth opportunities – is associated with option overpricing and low future delta-hedged option returns. We provide an explanation of this phenomenon based on the idea that retail investors exert buying...