A small but ambitious literature uses affine arbitrage-free models to estimate jointly U.S. Treasury term premiums and the term structure of equity risk premiums. Within this approach, this paper identifies the parameter restrictions that are consistent with a simple dividend discount model,...

In this paper, we compare price discovery in the foreign exchange futures and spot markets during a period in which the spot market was less transparent but had higher volume than the futures market. We develop a foreign exchange futures order flow measure that is a proxy for the order flow...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

We estimate the term structure of the price of variance risk (PVR), which helps distinguish between competing asset-pricing theories. First, we measure the PVR as proportional to the Sharpe ratio of short-term holding returns of delta-neutral index straddles; second, we estimate the PVR in a...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, investors seek to make their valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a modeluncertainty-induced utility function and show that model uncertainty increases investors' effective risk aversion. Using this utility...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund's alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

This paper examines the over-the-counter (OTC) interest rate derivatives (IRD) market in order to inform the design of post-trade price reporting. Our analysis uses a novel transaction-level data set to examine trading activity, the composition of market participants, levels of product...

This paper shows that the risk-bearing capacity of U.S. securities brokers and dealers is a strong determinant of risk premia in commodity markets. Commodity derivatives are the principal instrument used by producers and consumers of commodities to hedge against commodity price risk....