The major bull and bear markets of this century have suggested to many that large decade-to-decade stock market swings reflect irrational "fads and fashions" that periodically sweep investors. We argue instead that investors have perceived significant shifts in the long-run mean rate of future...

This paper investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. The idea is that "contagion" between markets occurs as the result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This...

We create a newspaper-based Equity Market Volatility (EMV) tracker that moves with the VIX and with the realized volatility of returns on the S&P 500. Parsing the underlying text, we find that 72 percent of EMV articles discuss the Macroeconomic Outlook, and 44 percent discuss Commodity Markets....

We find that among stocks dominated by retail investors, the lottery anomaly is amplified by high investor attention (proxied by high analyst coverage, salient earnings surprises, or recency of extreme positive returns) and intense social interactions (proxied by Facebook social connectedness or...

Studies find price increases for additions to the S&P 500 index but no decreases for deletions. Additions come with good earnings news, suggesting these studies are not just measuring an indexing effect. We develop a regression discontinuity design using Russell Indices for cleaner...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month S&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...

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...

This paper investigates the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts in order to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive, short-horizon portfolio autocorrelations. Using a simple theoretical framework, we...

This paper develops a dynamic programming model of the optimal refunding strategy and the corresponding value of a callable bond. The model differs from previous work on this subject primarily in that it explicitly admits the possibility of differences between the issuer's expectations of future...

American options on the S&P 500 index futures that violate the stochastic dominance bounds of Constantinides and Perrakis (2007) from 1983 to 2006 are identified as potentially profitable trades. Call bid prices more frequently violate their upper bound than put bid prices do, while violations...