Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

We find that weak identification can lead to econometric problems with Fama-MacBeth regressions, including serious size distortions and biased point estimates. Two sources of weak identification are particularly important and have been little studied in the finance literature – small betas and...

We examine the joint predictability of return and cash flow within a present value framework, by imposing the implications from a long-run risk model incorporating both time varying volatility and volatility uncertainty. We provide new evidence that the expected return variation and the variance...

Many securities markets are organized as double auctions where each incoming limit order --- i.e., an order to buy or sell at a specific price --- is stored in a data structure called the limit order book. A trade happens whenever a market order arrives --- i.e., an order to buy or sell at the...

The limit distribution of conventional test statistics for predictability may depend on the degree of persistence of the predictors. Therefore, diverging results and conclusions may arise because of the different asymptotic theories adopted. Using differencing transformations, we introduce a new...

The purpose of this research is to determine whether bankruptcy forecasting models are subject to industry and time specific effects. A sample of 15,848 firms was obtained from the Compustat and CRSP databases, spanning the time period 1950 to 2013, of which 396 were bankrupt. Using five models...

This paper examines whether the preliminary releases of GDP incorporate efficiently all available information or whether the preliminary estimates contain information that can be useful in predicting forthcoming GDP data revisions. Forecast rationality tests are applied to distinguish between...