The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. We use risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm’s exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the current financial landscape shaped by the crises and new regulations impacts Investment Banking’s business model. We will focus on quantitative implications, i.e. valuation, modeling and pricing issues, as well as qualitative implications,...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

There has been tremendous growth in interest rate futures markets since their beginning in 1975, both in terms of trading volume and the proliferation of new types of contracts. This paper focuses on the Treasury bill futures market and uses a descriptive statistic which was devised by Holbrook...

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the...

Price momentum strategies have historically generated high positive returns with little systematic risk. However, these strategies also experience infrequent but severe losses. During 13 of the 978 months in our 1929-2010 sample, losses to a US-equity momentum strategy exceed 20 percent per...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

Option-implied betas are a promising alternative to historical beta estimators, because they are inherently forward-looking and can incorporate new information immediately and fully. Recently, different implied beta estimators have been developed in previous literature, but very little is known...