Security Transaction Tax (STT) was introduced in the Indian capital market in 2004. It is a tax on transaction of equities as well as their derivatives. Despite the reduction in STT over the years, it constitutes a large percentage (next only to brokerage fee) of the total cost of trading. The...

This paper surveys the literature on the linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes. It focuses on three major questions. First, what are the basic theoretical linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes? Second, what is the empirical evidence supporting these...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the macroeconomic implications of financial imperfections. It focuses on two major channels through which financial imperfections can affect macroeconomic outcomes. The first channel, which operates through the demand side of finance...

This paper builds a model of high-frequency equity returns by separately modeling the dynamics of trade-time returns and trade arrivals. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we characterize the distributional behavior of high-frequency asset returns both in ordinary clock time and in...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of mandatory disclosure of losses at financial institutions when it is common knowledge that some banks have incurred losses but not which ones. We develop a model that features contagion, meaning that banks not hit by shocks may still suffer losses...

This paper documents and characterizes the time-varying structure of U.S. and international asset co-movements. Although some of the time variation could be genuine, the sampling uncertainty and time series properties of the series can distort significantly the underlying signal dynamics. We...

Using futures data for the period 1990 - 2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the...