We study the relation between order imbalance and past returns and firm characteristics and test a number of hypothesis including the disposition effect, momentum and contrarian trading, tax-loss selling and flight-to-quality hypothesis. These hypotheses make predictions about investors buy or...

This paper combines the concept of market sidedness with excess option demand (changes in open interest) to solve the empirical challenge of separating directional from uninformed trading motives in widely available, unsigned options data. Our measure of options market sidedness persistently...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

We compare the performance of time-series (TS) and cross-sectional (CS) strategies based on past returns. While CS strategies are zero-net investment long/short strategies, TS strategies take on a time-varying net-long investment in risky assets. For individual stocks, the difference between the...

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

Corporate bonds with large increases in implied volatility over the past month underperform those with large decreases in implied volatility by 0.6% per month. In contrast to An, Ang, Bali, and Cakici (2014) who show that implied volatility changes carry information about fundamental news, our...

I show that an asset pricing model for the equity claims of a value-maximizing firm can be constructed from its optimal financial contracting behavior. I study a dynamic contracting model in which firms trade off the costs and benefits of a given promise to pay external lenders in a specific...

We examine the relation between liquidity, volume, and volatility using a comprehensive sample of U.S. stocks in the post-decimalization period. For large stocks, effective spread and volume are positively related in the time series even after controlling for volatility, contrary to most...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that are poorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but have strong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global factors are jointly significant predictors of bond returns,...

We show that in a consumption-based asset-pricing model with hyperbolic discounting leading to dynamically inconsistent time preferences value premium increases nonlin-early with the degree of discounting and thus affects cross section of returns. To test our model empirically, we relate the...