Systemic risk is commonly used to describe the possibility of a series of correlated defaults among financial institutions---typically banks---that occur over a short period of time, often caused by a single major event. However, since the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, it has...

A test for long-run memory that is robust to short-range dependence is developed. It is a simple extension of Mandelbrot's quot;range over standard deviationquot; or R/S statistic, for which the relevant asymptotic sampling theory is derived via functional central limit theory. This test is...

The profitability of contrarian investment strategies need not be the result of stock market overreaction. Even if returns on individual securities are temporally independent, portfolio strategies that attempt to exploit return reversals may still earn positive expected profits. This is due to...

We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices and trading volume when agents face fixed transactions costs. We show that even small fixed costs can give rise to large quot;no-tradequot; regions for each agent's optimal trading policy. The inability to trade more frequently reduces the...

Technical analysis, also known as quot;charting,quot; has been a part of financial practice for many decades, but this discipline has not received the same level of academic scrutiny and acceptance as more traditional approaches such as fundamental analysis. One of the main obstacles is the...

We examine the implications of portfolio theory for the cross-sectional behavior of equity trading volume. Two-fund separation theorems suggest a natural definition for trading activity: share turnover. If two-fund separation holds, share turnover must be identical for all securities. If...

The predictability of an asset's returns will affect option prices on that asset, even though predictability is typically induced by the drift which does not enter the option pricing formula. For discretely sampled data, predictability is linked to the parameters that do enter the option pricing...

Continuous-time stochastic processes have become central to many disciplines, yet the fact that they are approximations to physically realizable phenomena is often overlooked. We quantify one aspect of the approximation errors of continuous-time models by investigating the replication errors...

Typical value-at-risk (VaR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...

We derive an intertemporal capital asset pricing model with multiple assets and heterogeneous investors, and explore its implications for the behavior of trading volume and asset returns. Assets contain two types of risks: market risk and the risk of changing market conditions. We show that...