Agency mortgage-backed securities trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to-be-announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as...

Investors can trade individual agency mortgage-backed securities as specified pools (SPs), or trade them through TBA forward contracts. Sellers in the TBA market deliver the cheapest possible pool that fulfills the contracts, so they are traded on a cheapest to deliver basis. More valuable...

We examine how the confusion and regulatory uncertainty generated by the imposition of short sale restrictions in September 2008 impacted equity option markets. We uncover three primary findings. First, investors seeking short exposure in financial stocks did not migrate to the option market to...

We employ data over 2005-2009 which uniquely identify categories of traders to test whether speculators like hedge funds and swap dealers cause price changes or volatility. We find little evidence that speculators destabilize financial markets. To the contrary, speculative trading activity...

Network analysis has become a key framework in financial economics in understanding how interconnectedness among market participants results in spillovers, amplifies or absorbs shocks, and creates other nonlinear effects that ultimately impact market health. In this paper, we propose a new...

Margins are the major safeguards against default risk on a derivatives exchange. When the clearing house sets margin requirements, it does so by only focusing on individual clearing firm positions (e.g., the SPAN system). We depart from this traditional approach and present an alternative method...

This paper reviews the more recent literature addressing different facets of speculation in commodity markets, including the role of speculators and the impact that financialization in recent years. While speculation and financialization can theoretically destabilize commodity markets, the...