Bitcoin plunged by 30% on May 19, 2021. We examine the outage the largest crypto exchange Binance experienced during the crash, when it halted trading for retail clients and stopped providing transaction data. We find evidence that Binance back-filled these missing transactions with data that...

Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over a shorter-term horizon - instead, I shift focus to severe downside risk (i.e., crashes). I use the cointegrating relationship between the log S&P Composite Index and log earnings over 1871 to 2015, combined with...

Stockholders are faced with both macroeconomic uncertainty and uncertainty that is generated from fears. We develop a financial stress factor as a proxy for pessimism that operates through stockholders' expectations about the elevated market volatility and shocks the cross-section of stock...

Political risk, one of the most significant uncertainty shocks, affects firms' future attitudes toward risks and plays a crucial role in their decision making. A stock price crash risk is a classical topic in financial markets; therefore, this paper probes the relationship between firm-level...

I introduce a novel proxy of investor sentiment and differences of opinion among trendchasing investors to forecast skewness in daily aggregate stock market returns. The new proxy is an easy-to-construct, real time measure available at different frequencies for more than a century. Empirically I...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

We present a detailed bubble analysis of the Bitcoin to US Dollar price dynamics from January 2012 to February 2018. We introduce a robust automatic peak detection method that classifies price time series into periods of uninterrupted market growth (drawups) and regimes of uninterrupted market...

Motivated by the lure of cryptocurrencies for retail investors, whose concentrated holdings are particularly exposed to price crash risk, we study the relationship between investor attention and crash risk. Adopting a quantile regression approach, we find that the connection is concentrated in...

We present a dynamic Rational Expectations (RE) bubble model of prices with the intention to evaluate it on optimal investment strategies applied to Bitcoin. Our bubble model is defined as a geometric Brownian motion combined with separate crash (and rally) discrete jump distributions associated...