The early stage of the 2007-08 financial crisis was marked by large value losses for bank stocks. This paper identifies the equity funds most affected by this valuation shock and examines its consequences for the nonfinancial stocks owned by the respective funds. We document three key empirical...

Mutual funds are mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to disclose information on their investment objectives and risks. In this paper, we study the informational value of U.S. mutual funds' qualitative disclosures by analyzing the content of funds' prospectuses. First, we...

Using the introduction of high-speed rail (HSR) as an exogenous shock to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to (i) a significant increase in information production, evidenced by a higher frequency of analysts visiting portfolio firms,...

We show that options written on stocks with low prices are over-priced. This effect is robust to a variety of tests, controlling for common stock- and option- risk characteristics, and to reasonable transaction costs. Natural experiments corroborate this finding; options tend to become...

We consider a market where traders have asymmetric information regarding the distribution of asset return and study price discovery of derivatives. The informed trader has private information regarding arbitrary higher moments of asset return, such as volatility or skewness, and exploits her...

Recently, for standard asset classes, the first mutual clearing agreements between Central Coun- terparties (CCPs) have come into existence. There are already global concerns over the unique threats and benefits which arise from these situations, and further concern for an extension of agree-...

Following the 2008 financial crisis, regulation mandates the clearing of the CDS market through Central Clearing Counter-parties (CCPs). Large CCPs are now designated as 'Global Systemically Important Institutions' (GSIIs), whose unlikely-but-plausible failure threatens global financial market...

We study whether management practices determine merger and acquisition (M&A) success. We model management as an unobserved (latent) variable in a standard microeconomic model of the firm and derive firm-year management estimates. We validate these estimates against benchmark survey data on...

We investigate whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict has affected investors' assessment concerning a green energy transition. Based on a global energy sector sample, we apply an event study around the invasion on February 24, 2022. We find that energy firms' CAAR are positive around the event....

We report strong evidence that changes of momentum, i.e. "acceleration", defined as the first difference of successive returns, provide better performance and higher explanatory power than momentum. The corresponding Γ-factor explains the momentum-sorted portfolios entirely but not the reverse....