In the finance literature, a common practice is to create characteristic portfolios by sorting on characteristics associated with average returns. We show that the resulting portfolios are likely to capture not only the priced risk associated with the characteristic, but also unpriced risk. We...

In a one-period model where each investor consumes a single good, and where borrowing and lending are private and real, there is a universal constant that tells how much each investor hedges his foreign investments. The constant depends only on average risk tolerance across investors. The same...

We use a novel pricing model to filter times series of diffusive volatility and jump intensity from Samp;P 500 index options. These two measures capture the ex-ante risk assessed by investors. We find that both components of risk vary substantially over time, are quite persistent, and correlate...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month Samp;P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although pre-crash option prices conform to the...

In pricing primary-market options and in making secondary markets, financial intermediaries depend on the quality of forecasts of the variance of the underlying assets. Hence, the gain from improved pricing of options would be a measure of the value of a forecast of underlying asset returns....

In the present paper we analyze the relationship between index funds and asset prices. In particular, our analysis of daily index fund flows indicates a strong contemporaneous correlation between fund inflows and Samp;P market returns. We also document a strong negative correlation between fund...

Is the pricing of sovereign risk linear during bearish episodes? Or can initial shocks on economic fundamentals be exacerbated by endogenous factors that create nonlinearities? We test for nonlinearities in the sovereign bond market of European peripheral countries during the debt crisis and...

The optimal portfolio of a utility-maximizing investor trading in the S&P 500 index and cash, subject to proportional transaction costs, becomes stochastically dominated when overlaid with a zero-net-cost portfolio of S&P 500 options bought at their ask and written at their bid price in most...

We investigate a structural model of market and firm-level dynamics in order to jointly price long-dated S&P 500 options and tranche spreads on the five-year CDX index. We demonstrate the importance of calibrating the model to match the entire term structure of CDX index spreads because it...

Many ways exist to measure and model financial asset volatility. In principle, as the frequency of the data increases, the quality of forecasts should improve. Yet, there is no consensus about a true' or best' measure of volatility. In this paper we propose to jointly consider absolute daily...