Based on 58,256 news articles published in the Financial Times during a 15-year period that cover companies in the DJIA, we find that a trading strategy that longs stocks with the most negative news and shorts stocks with the least negative news is not profitable. Consistent with this result, we...

This paper disentangles the complexity of the distress risk premium in stock returns using the risk-neutral measure of credit risk (valued by CDS spread) and investigates the relationship between credit risk and the market , size, value, and momentum effects. Consistent with the argument for a...

The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...

Divergent trends, as observed, between growth in the financial and real sectors of the global economy entail the need for further research, especially on the motivations behind investment decisions. Investments in market economies are generally guided by call-put option pricing models - which...

This paper develops a liquidity measure tailored to the foreign exchange (FX) market, quanties the amount of commonality in liquidity across dierent exchange rates, and determines theextent of liquidity risk premiums embedded in FX returns. The new liquidity measure utilizesultra high frequency...

Do we know if a short selling ban or a Tobin Tax result in more stable asset prices? Or do they in fact make things worse? Just like medicine regulatory measures in financial markets aim at improving an already complex system, cause side effects and interplay with other measures. In this paper...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...