Banks are believed to be opaque to outsiders, since opacity is a property of the assets that they hold. A social planner would like banks to be transparent, riskless and highly efficient intermediators of liquidity. However, these goals appear to be conflicting. Whether and how opacity and...

This study examines the impact of CEO duality on firms' internal capital allocation efficiency. We observe that when the CEO is also chair of the board, diversified firms make inefficient investments, as they allocate more capital to business segments with relatively low growth opportunities...

We estimate the term structures of risk-neutral forward variance and skewness, and examine their predictive power for equity market excess returns and variance. We use Partial Least Squares to extract a single predictive factor from each term structure that is motivated by the theoretical...

We create a market-wide measure of dispersion in options investors' expectations by aggregating across all stocks the dispersion in trading volume across moneynesses (DISP). DISP exhibits strong negative predictive power for future market returns and its information content is not subsumed by...

We conduct a decomposition for the stock market return by incorporating the information from 124 macro variables. Using factor analysis, we estimate six common factors and run a VAR containing these factors and financial variables such as the market dividend yield and the T-bill rate. Including...

This paper proposes a Markov regime switching framework for modeling carbon emission (CO2) allowances that combines a regime switching behavior and disequilibrium adjustments in the mean process, along with a state-dependent dynamic volatility process. We find that all regime switching based...

This paper studies the spot and futures cross-market efficiency implications of the regulatory short-selling constraints imposed during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. We find the equilibrium position for the basis during the ban is below that normally seen, with the spot price higher relative...