In assessing drivers of commodity prices and volatility at this stage of the current super-cycle in commodities (year 12 of a projected 25), it is vital to understand that production cost is a fundamental. Moreover, marginal production costs are among the most powerful drivers of commodity...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

We argue the earnings announcement premium is a measure of firm-specific uncertainty aversion. Our stylized model shows earnings announcements, as pure news events, are priced only if investors are uncertainty averse; further, the earnings announcement return is negatively correlated to future...

We examine how the market valuation of firms varies on account of characteristics that make them vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic across different stages of the crisis. Using plant location data that uniquely identify the vulnerability of firms to operational disruptions, we find that firms...

The effects of sentiment should be strongest during times of heightened valuation uncertainty. As such, we document a significant amplifying role for market uncertainty in the relation between sentiment and aggregate investment. A one-standard-deviation increase in uncertainty more than doubles...

This paper investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on firms’ investment sensitivity to their peers’ stock prices. We find that investment increasingly responds to the variation of peers’ prices during the high policy uncertainty period in China. To deal with the...

BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are viewed currently as pillars of relative political, economic and financial stability, with the prospect of a major shift in future world power. The paper aims at investigating the relationships among the economic, financial and political...

This paper theoretically investigates the effect of uncertainty about future investment on expected stock returns. Based on a real options framework, we incorporate the learning-by-doing effect to analyze the irreversible investment problem. In our investment decision framework, the timing of...

We develop a model in which feedback effects from equity markets to firms' access to external finance allow uninformed traders to profit by short selling a firm's stock while going long on its competitors. Because this strategy distorts the investment incentives of the firm targeted by short...

This paper explores the link between IPO underpricing and financial markets. In my model the IPO is a mean for a capital constrained initial investor to exit and thereby to raise funds for a new investment opportunity. This investor is privately informed vis-a-vis outside investors about the...