Strengthening competition in the equity markets has long been a major public policy objective. This paper turns to another important determinant of market quality, one that has received relatively little attention in the public policy debates: order integration — the way in which orders are...

Motivated by the nature of asset pricing models, we investigate the cross-sectional relation between the market's ex-ante view of a stock's risk and the stock's ex-ante expected return. We demonstrate that an ex-ante measure of expected returns based on analyst price targets is highly related to...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

This paper provides an explanation of investing in stock market anomalies in an expected utility paradigm. Classical selection rules fail to provide a preference for high expected return portfolios. The paper utilizes the almost dominance rules to examine the practice of investing in size,...

This paper provides an explanation of investing in stock market anomalies in an expected utility paradigm. Classical selection rules fail to provide a preference for high expected return portfolios. The paper utilizes the almost dominance rules to examine the practice of investing in size,...

Option volatilities have significant predictive power for the cross section of stock returns and vice versa. Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities tend to rise over the following month whereas increases in put implied volatilities forecast future decreases in next-month stock...

Investment bankers focus on narrow, industry-based peer groups for individual stock valuation. And some market-neutral equity hedge fund managers restrict their portfolios to be sector-neutral as well. Yet, academic research into contrarian strategy investment performance has typically invoked...

Using a measure of ex-ante expected returns based on analyst price targets, we find strong evidence that investors price both systematic (beta and co-skewness) and non-systematic (idiosyncratic volatility) risk when determining the appropriate rate of return on a security. We demonstrate that...

We find that the stock market underreacts to stock level liquidity shocks: liquidity shocks are not only positively associated with contemporaneous returns, but they also predict future return continuations for up to six months. Long-short portfolios sorted on liquidity shocks generate...