There is substantial evidence on the influence of political outcomes on the business cycle and stock market. We further hypothesize that uncertainty about the outcome of a U.S. presidential election should be reflected in pre-election common stock returns. Prior research pools returns based on...

We examine the composition of return volatility, serial correlation, and trading costs before and after decimalization on the New York Stock Exchange. We decompose the variance of price changes into components associated with public news, rounding errors, and market-making frictions. We find...

We report further evidence of the difference in execution costs between Nasdaq and the NYSE before and after the 1997 market reforms. We find that informed trading costs are consistently higher on Nasdaq both before and after the reforms. In the pre-reform period the Nasdaq-NYSE disparity in...

This paper extends the risk-neutrality default model of municipal bonds to consider the effect of risk aversion on the estimation of default probability. A model is proposed to separate the default risk assessment from the investor's risk aversion. Empirical results show that the risk-neutrality...

We examine the interactive effect of default and interest rate risk on duration of defaultable bonds. We show that duration for defaultable bonds can be longer or shorter than default-free bonds depending on the relation between default intensity and interest rates. Empirical evidence indicates...