This paper documents that when a southern California home gets designated to a wildfire risk zone, its price drops by 11% relative to homes just outside the designation boundary. Whereas the risk designation is discontinuous, the underlying risk is continuous — suggesting the price effect is...

The central problem for financial regulation is reducing systemic risk. Systemic risk is the risk that the failure of one significant institution can cause or significantly contribute to the failure of other significant institutions. This paper addresses the five most important policies for...

This paper examines factors that affect the performance of investment banks in the G7 and Switzerland. In particular, we focus on the role of risk, liquidity and investment banking fees. Panel analysis shows that those variables significantly impact upon performance as derived from stochastic...

The paper assesses the most recent performance, persistence and riskiness of contrarian portfolios. Evidence from the major world and European market of France shows that such portfolios appear profitable on average, but their performance is not persistent from one holding period to the next;...

Consistent with Bayesian learning models, I find that two types of uncertainty—market uncertainty and firm-signal uncertainty—have opposite effects on investors' learning from new information. I provide novel evidence that investor learning increases with the level of prior market...

Climate science finds that the trend towards higher global temperatures exacerbates the risks of droughts. We investigate whether the prices of food stocks efficiently discount these risks. Using data from thirty-one countries with publicly-traded food companies, we rank these countries each...

Climate models predict that many natural hazards will become increasingly damaging and costly to insure as the effects of climate change manifest. We study how the cost of hedging disaster risk changes home prices by utilizing a 2012 law that mandated flood insurance premium increases for...

Growth and value are popular terms in the lexicon of finance. For many years, scholars and investment professionals have claimed that value strategies outperform the growth ones, even in major market declines. However, since the early 2010's, this seems to no longer hold, as growth strategies...

We estimate the effects of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy changes on jump activity by employing high frequency non-parametric jump detection methods. We find that anticipated changes in the Fed funds have no significant effect on jumps. In contrast, jumps in the second moments of...

In this paper we review the literature on the short term predictability of stock prices conditional on large prior price changes. This research area is characterized by a large number of studies reflecting different markets, time periods, methodologies and model parameters. While most of the...