We model the opacity of over-the-counter (OTC) markets in a setup where agents share risks, but have incentives to default and their financial positions are not mutually observable. We show that this setup results in excess "leverage" in that parties take on short OTC positions that lead to...

Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market in completeness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more...

This paper provides a selective survey of the voluminous literature on tests for market efficiency. The ideas discussed include standard autocorrelation tests, multi-period regression tests and volatility tests. The formulation and estimation of models for time-varying volatility are also...

We introduce a new theoretical framework to analyze imperfectly competitive financial markets and trade in assets in an international context. We present a two-country macroeconomic model in which agents are risk averse, assets are imperfect substitutes, the number of financial assets is...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has undergone a revolution. But have market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from current...

We study the impact of investor heterogeneity on mutual fund market segmentation. To motivate our empirical analysis, we make two assumptions. First, some investors inherently value broker services. Second, because brokers are only compensated when they sell mutual funds, they have little...

We propose a latent variables approach within a present-value model to estimate the expected returns and expected dividend growth rates of the aggregate stock market. This approach aggregates information contained in the history of price-dividend ratios and dividend growth rates to predict...

In this paper we show that temperature is an aggregate risk factor that adversely affects economic growth. Our argument is based on evidence from global capital markets which shows that the covariance between country equity returns and temperature (i.e., temperature betas) contains sharp...

Movements in asset prices are a major risk confronting individuals. This paper establishes new asset pricing results when agents differ in risk preference, time preference and/or expectations. It shows that risk tolerance is a critical concept driving savings decisions, consumption allocations,...