This paper sheds new light on the role bank executives played in the financial crisis. It examines whether they foresaw the poor performance of their own bank by analyzing their insider trading patterns. Insider trading during 2006 predicts stock returns during the crisis: a portfolio strategy...

In this study, we investigate the existence of long-term co-movements among the prices of commodity futures contracts. We use a cointegration test, which accounts for the presence of a structural break. We show that while there is a long-term relationship among agricultural and among...

We introduce a new measure of activity of financial markets that provides a direct access to their level of endogeneity. This measure quantifies how much of price changes are due to endogenous feedback processes, as opposed to exogenous news. For this, we calibrate the self-excited conditional...

This paper examines the relative performance of small-caps vs. large caps surrounding periods of peaks and troughs of economic activity, and reexamines the relationship between the small firm anomaly and the business cycle. Small-cap firms outperform large caps over the year subsequent to an...

This paper explores the changes in the daily seasonality of the Romanian foreign market from January 2005 to February 2010. Our investigation employs data from the prices in the Romanian national currency, of the two main currencies used in the financial transactions: euro and US dollar. For the...

This paper examines the interrelation between short selling and volatility as differing from previous research in that it focuses on intraday activities, rather than the daily price movements. We demonstrate that the effects of short selling activity change during the two sessions of the day and...

The London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor) are two key market benchmark interest rates used in a plethora of financial contracts with notional amounts running into the hundreds of trillions of dollars. The integrity of the rate-setting process for...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

This paper investigates if familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks, and pour into (familiar)...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...