The offering prices of 64 issues of a popular retail structured equity product were, on average, almost 8% greater than estimates of the products' fair market values obtained using option pricing methods. Under reasonable assumptions about the underlying stocks' expected returns, the mean...

The ability to create securities providing state-contingent payoffs tailored to specific investors seems conducive to improving allocative efficiency. But if some investors assign incorrect probability weights to events, financial institutions can exploit these errors by creating financial...

Financial institutions that issue commodity-linked notes hedge their liabilities by buying commodity futures. Henderson, Pearson and Wang (2015) show that these futures trades impact commodity futures prices and interpret this as evidence that uninformed financial flows into the commodity...

Existing literature nds that proxies for short-sale constraints do not predict bond returns.Using more comprehensive data over a longer sample period and rating and maturity-matchedbenchmarks we nd that utilization, which proxies for short-sale constraints, predicts negativereturns. Many lending...

We use retail Structured Equity Product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for individual stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEPs' reference stocks based on a variety of benchmarks including behavioral factor models and factors based on...

We find evidence consistent with previously unrecognized market manipulation by broker-dealers. Specifically, we show that pre-trade hedging, which is distinct from front-running, alters prices at which derivative trades occur. We document that this behavior is intentional by exploiting...