Issuers of structured products have great power when setting the price of their securities. Each issuer is the sole liquidity provider in the secondary market for her products, and short-selling is not possible. Using a large, high-frequency data set, we investigate the pricing dynamics of a...

Option prices, particularly those of out-of-the-money equity index puts, are difficult to justify in a no-arbitrage framework. This paper shows how limits to arbitrage affect the relative pricing of out-of-the-money put vs. call options (option-implied skewness). Decomposing the price of...

International commodity market arbitrage and its corollary, the law of one price, are generally based on moving the commodity between markets to exploit price differences, making allowance for prevailing exchange rates. This form of arbitrage is clearly impossible for services and immobile...

The finance literature has found it challenging to explain empirically observed option returns, most notably in the case of out-of-the-money (OTM) equity index puts. I propose liquidation risk in options markets, defined as the possibility of forced selling of speculative positions following a...

International commodity market arbitrage is generally based on moving the commodity between countries to exploit price differences, making allowance for exchange rates. This form of arbitrage is clearly impossible for services and immobile objects such as real estate. However, there is the...

We exploit joint dynamics of lendable and lent shares in the equity lending market to measure recall activity by lenders. We find that high recall activity predicts poor stock performance and precedes the lowest returns by two months. This suggests that short sellers are forced out of otherwise...

Dark pools volumes have increased significantly over the last decade. This has raised concerns on the reliability of reference prices used by these pools, and asymmetric participant outcomes via “latency arbitrage”. Using a novel data set provided by the major UK exchanges and dark pools...

We show that poor mutual fund performance can result from agency problems that drive fund inceptions. Funds created to exploit investor irrationality have different portfolio compositions at inception, loading heavily on past winner stocks. Investors reward these funds with abnormally high...