Political uncertainty is a key determinant of investment decisions. Specifically, the uncertainty that surrounds government policy makes beliefs noisier and depresses stock prices. In this paper, we explore whether institutional investors "herd", i.e., mimic each other's trades, in response to...

Changes in mortality rates have an impact on the life insurance industry, the financial sector (as a significant proportion of the financial markets is driven by pension funds), the governmental agencies, and the decision and policy makers. Thus, the pricing of financial, pension and insurance...

We analyze the size dependence and temporal stability of firm bankruptcy risk in the US economy by applying Zipf scaling techniques. We focus on a single risk factor - the debt-to-asset ratio R - in order to study the stability of the Zipf distribution of R over time. We find that the Zipf...