The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

Using a comprehensive high-frequency foreign exchange dataset, we present evidence of time-of-day effects in foreign exchange returns through a significant tendency for currencies to depreciate during local trading hours. We confirm this pattern across a range of currencies and time zones. We...

"This paper proposes a new tractable approach to solving asset allocation problems in situations with a large number of risky assets which pose problems for standard numerical approaches. Investor preferences are assumed to be defined over moments of the wealth distribution such as its skewness...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...