The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the logperiodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as a...

We show that financial risk-taking originates in preindustrial ancestral population diversity. We use data on immigrants residing in the United States and show that controlling for all known determinants of portfolio decisions, diversity positively affects stock market participation and asset...

Based on the insight that risk exposure as quantified in the consumption based asset pricing model (CCAPM) is linearly proportional to the cash flow growth rate, we introduce a discounted cash flow model with a time-varying expected return structure matching the implicitly assumed risk exposure...

In this paper, I estimate the effect of mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosure on corporate value. Using the introduction of mandatory GHG emissions reporting for firms listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange as a source of exogenous variation, I find that firms most...

We investigate how board overlap affects coordination and performance among public firms. Our identification exploits the staggered introduction of Corporate OpportunityWaivers (COWs) in nine U.S. states since 2000. By reducing legal risk to directors serving on multiple boards, the COW...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of...

In this study, we examine the rationale that informed traders use in choosing various financial instruments in order to speculate on the volatility of the underlying asset, here a common stock. Using a continuous-time trading model, we demonstrate that the quality of the private information...

We present a new theory of asset pricing and portfolio choices under asymmetric reasoning, contrast the predictions with those under asymmetric information, and present experimental evidence in favor of our theory. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis and its formal foundation, the Rational...

Using data for the 1978-2008 period, this study presents evidence for cointegration between securitized (NAREIT) and direct (NCREIF) total return indices. Cointegration between the indices indicates that REITs and direct real estate are substitutable in the portfolio of a long-horizon...