Derivatives strategies that aim to earn variance risk premiums are exposed to sharp price declines during market crises, calling into question their suitability for the longterm investor. Our paper defines, analyzes, and proposes potential solutions to three problems (payoff, leverage and finite...

This paper investigates empirically whether uncertainty about the expected returns on the market portfolio can explain the performance of hedge funds both in the cross-section and over time. We measure uncertainty via volatility of aggregate volatility (VOV) and construct an investable version...

This paper investigates empirically whether uncertainty about volatility of the market portfolio can explain the performance of hedge funds both in the cross-section and over time. We measure uncertainty about volatility of the market portfolio via volatility of aggregate volatility (VOV) and...

Certain institutional features of 401(k) plans can create conflicts of interest between plan participants and financial advisors that advise them. We study one such conflict: when advisors are affiliated with the plan's recordkeeper. Using a large dataset of 401(k) plans, we find that affiliated...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

The trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market's share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price. We exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions. Thereby we resolve the...

This paper studies the dynamics of stock market volatility and retail investor attention measured by internet search queries. We find a strong co-movement of stock market indices' realized volatility and the search queries for their names. Furthermore, Granger causality is bi-directional: high...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...