“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

This paper investigates the information in corporate credit ratings. We examine the extent to which firms' credit ratings measure raw probability of default as opposed to systematic risk of default, a firm's tendency to default in bad times. We find that credit ratings are dominated as...

In this paper, we investigate whether the international version of CAPM can price rational and irrational sentiments of U.S. individual and institutional investor sentiments. The results show that the CAPM prices rational sentiments driven by fundamentals and irrational sentiments not driven by...

This note develops the solutions of the static portfolio optimization problem in explicit matrix form. Three cases are contemplated and connected, with the derivation of relevant corner solutions: the unconstrained problem in the presence of risky assets only, the constrained one, and the...

About the EditorsThis book contains the recent contributions of Edwin J Elton and Martin J Gruber to the field of investments. All of the articles in this book have been published in the leading finance and economic journals. Sixteen of the nineteen articles have been published in the last ten...

Consistent with the predictions of Brennan and Thakor's (1990) model of shareholder preferences, we find that, on average, institutional shareholders are net sellers during share repurchases. After controlling for liquidity provision and characteristics investing, we find that a one standard...

In this paper, we analyze how large institutions differ from other investors and the implications that these differences have for stock returns, market liquidity, and corporate governance. We find that large institutional investors -- a category including all managers with greater than $100...

We cross-sectionally analyze the presence of aggregated hidden depth and trade volume in the S&P 500 and identify its key determinants. We find that the spread is the main predictor for a stock’s hidden dimension, both in terms of traded and posted liquidity. Our findings moreover suggest that...

The link between investor sentiment and asset valuation is at the center of a long-running debate in behavioral finance. Using a new composite sentiment indicator, we show that the conventional risk does not explain the abnormal returns of portfolios most sensitive to the sentiment factor. Our...

The objective of this study is to compare fixed price and book building IPOs in terms of aftermarket performances. On a sample of 28 IPOs (15 book build and 13 fixed price) from 2004 to 2007, it is found that book built IPOs outperform fixed price IPOs, on the contrary to most of the studies...