The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

If price and quantity are the fundamental building blocks of any theory of market interactions, the importance of trading volume in understanding the behavior of financial markets is clear. However, while many economic models of financial markets have been developed to explain the behavior of...

This is an introduction to a five-volume collection of papers on financial econometrics to be published by Edward Elgar Publishers in 2007. Financial econometrics is one of the fastest growing branches of economics today, both in academia and in industry. The increasing sophistication of...

Stop-loss strategies are commonly used by investors to reduce their holdings in risky assets if prices or total wealth breach certain pre-specified thresholds. We derive closed-form expressions for the impact of stop-loss strategies on asset returns that are serially correlated, regime...

With the rise of social media, investors have a new tool to measure sentiment in real time. However, the nature of these sources of data raises serious questions about its quality. Since anyone on social media can participate in a conversation about markets -- whether they are informed or not --...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

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...

Hedge funds are often cited as attractive investments because of their diversification benefits and distinctive risk profiles - in contrast to traditional investments such as stocks and bonds, hedge-fund returns have more complex risk exposures that yield complementary sources of risk premia....

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...