Hedge fund activism generates persistent performance, but heterogeneity in performance suggests that some hedge fund activists are more skilled than others. We use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Bayesian estimation algorithm to isolate a time-invariant activist-specific skill component from...

Continuously rebalanced long-short trades are similar to highly levered trades in that their PNL profile depends not only on the final distribution of return, but also on the realized co-variance structure of the asset pair. It's easily possible for both orientations of a rebalanced long-short...

The US Treasury effectively ”owns” about 24% of the stocks held by high income US taxable investors. Through the capital gains tax, Uncle Sam has an effective exposure of more than $1 trillion of equities. And this huge-but-silent investor might be about to get a lot bigger if capital gains...

This paper investigates how investor sentiment affects stock market returns and evaluates the predictability power of sentiment indices on U.S. and EU stock market returns. As regards the American example, evidence shows that investor sentiment indices have an economic and statistical...

This paper analyzes empirical market utility functions and pricing kernels derived from the DAX and DAX option data for three market regimes. A consistent parametric framework of stochastic volatility is used. All empirical market utility functions show a region of risk proclivity that is...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Stocks are exposed to the risk of sudden downward jumps. Additionally, a crash in one stock (or index) can increase the risk of crashes in other stocks (or indices). Our paper explicitly takes this contagion risk into account and studies its impact on the portfolio decision of a CRRA investor...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

This paper is the first to analyze and value early exercises of Individual Investors in fixed-income investment products. Assuming decision and transaction costs we consider that a continuous decision-making on holding or exercising is not optimal anymore and propose a new approach to modeling...