This paper examines whether investors receive a compensation for holding stocks with a strong sensitivity to extreme market downturns in a worldwide sample covering 40 different countries. I find that stocks with strong crash sensitivity earn higher average returns than stocks with weak crash...

We investigate whether investors receive compensation for holding stocks with strong systematic liquidity risk in the form of extreme downside liquidity (EDL) risk. Following the logic of Acharya and Pedersen (2005), we capture a stock's EDL risk by the lower tail dependence between (i)...

We provide the first comprehensive analysis of option information for pricing the cross-section of stock returns by jointly examining extensive sets of firm and option characteristics. Using portfolio sorts and high-dimensional methods, we show that certain option measures have significant...

Conventional wisdom says that economic surplus is created when the cost of litigation is foregone in favor of settlement, a theory flowing from the Coase Theorem. The cost-benefit analysis weighs settlement against the expected value of litigation net of transaction cost. This calculus yields...

From a financial economic perspective, the governing condition of a meritorious civil action is the uncertainty of outcome. Expectation and outcome deviate, and the spread is the measure of uncertainty (or variance). During litigation each party has an option to settle or select trial. The...