This paper investigates whether security markets price the effect of social distancing on firms' operations. We document that firms that are more resilient to social distancing significantly outperformed those with lower resilience during the COVID-19 outbreak, even after controlling for the...

This paper shows that changes in the tone of central bank communication have a significant effect on asset prices. Tone captures how the central bank frames economic fundamentals and its monetary policy. When tone becomes more positive, stock prices increase, whereas credit spreads and...

This paper shows that low risk anomalies in the CAPM and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option-implied ex-ante skewness is strongly related to ex-post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct...

Using the pandemic as a laboratory, we show that asset markets assign a time- varying price to firms' disaster risk exposure. In 2020 the cross-section of realized and expected stock returns reflected firms' different exposure to the pandemic, as measured by their vulnerability to social...