The essays empirically show the impact of investors speculation and disagreements on the returns and trading volume of securities. The results also shed light on the central issues of price formation and investors’ trading motives in security markets.The first essay investigates whether the...

This thesis is a collection of three essays in empirical studies on derivatives. In the first chapter, I investigate whether credit default swap spreads are affected by how the total risk is decomposed into the systematic risk and the idiosyncratic risk for a given level of the total risk. The...