This paper shows that high frequency trading may play a dysfunctional role in financial markets. Contrary to arbitrageurs who make financial markets more efficient by taking advantage of and thereby eliminating mispricings, high frequency traders can create a mispricing that they unknowingly...

Fama (1970) defined an efficient market as one in which prices always “fully reflect” available information. This paper formalizes this definition and provides various characterizations relating to equilibrium models, profitable trading strategies, and equivalent martingale measures. These...

After the 2007 credit crisis, nancial bubbles have once again emerged as a topic of current concern. An open problem is to determine in real time whether or not a given asset's price process exhibits a bubble. Due to recent progress in the characterization of asset price bubbles using the...

This paper provides asymptotic valuation formulas for credit derivatives on baskets, including synthetic and cash flow CDOs. As such, it provides the link between the "bottom up" and "top down" approaches used for the pricing of these credit risky securities

Credit default swaps (CDS) are term insurance contracts written on traded bonds. This paper studies the economics of CDS using the economics of insurance literature as a basis for analysis. It is alleged that trading in CDS caused the 2007 credit crisis, and therefore trading CDS is an "evil"...

This paper studies the economic foundations for maximum leverage ratio capital adequacy rules. The paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, we show how to determine the maximum leverage ratio such that the probability of insolvency is less than some predetermined quantity. Two,...

This paper studies capital adequacy rules based on Value-at-Risk (VaR), leverage ratios, and stress testing. VaR is the basis of Basel II, and all three approaches are proposed in Basel III. This paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, we prove that these three rules provide an...

In spite of the popularity of model calibration in finance, empirical researchers have put more emphasis on model estimation than on the equally important goodness-of-fit problem. This is due partly to the ignorance of modelers, and more to the ability of existing statistical tests to detect...

Unconventional monetary policy tools are based on the belief that there exists a zero-lower bound on interest rates. This paper argues, based on economic theory and the empirical evidence, that this belief is a myth and not a reality. It is shown that a negative default-free spot rate of...

This paper derives a generalized multiple-factor asset pricing model using only the assumption of no arbitrage. This generalization differs from the standard multiple-factor pricing models in two ways. First, similar to standard models, a traded asset's expected return is linear in a finite...