Recent empirical work suggests that a proxy for the probability of informed trading (PIN) is an important determinant of the cross-section of average returns. This paper examines whether PIN is priced because of information asymmetry or because of other liquidity effects that are unrelated to...

We conduct an analysis of the risk and return characteristics of a number of widely used fixed income arbitrage strategies. We find that the strategies requiring more “intellectual capital†to implement tend to produce significant alphas after controlling for bond and equity market...

Although it is well known that appearance-based impressions affect labor market and election outcomes, little is known about the role appearance plays in financial transactions. We address this question using photographs of potential borrowers from a peer-to-peer lending site. Consistent with...

We study the importance of supply constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in house price cycles across geographies in the United States. Comparing the equilibrium house price generated with and without supply constraints in a representative-agent model under irreversibility of housing...

Frequently, economic theory places shape restrictions on functional relationships between economic variables. This paper develops a method to constrain the values of the first and second derivatives of nonparametric locally polynomial estimators. We apply this technique to estimate the state...

Dai and Singleton (2002) and Duffee (2002) show that there is a tension in affine term structure models between matching the mean and the volatility of interest rates. This article examines whether this tension can be solved by an alternative parametrization of the price of risk. The empirical...

This article investigates the effects of mortgage-backed security (MBS) hedging activity on interest rate volatility and proposes a model that takes these effects into account. An empirical examination suggests that the inclusion of information about MBSs considerably improves model performance...