How does competition in firms' product markets influence stock returns? We examine this question using firms domiciled in the UK. We find that firms in less concentrated industries earn higher returns, even after controlling for the well-known determinants of the cross-section of UK stock...

We decompose the variance risk premium into upside and downside variance risk premia. These components reflect market compensation for changes in good and bad uncertainties. Their difference is a measure of the skewness risk premium (SRP), which captures asymmetric views on favorable versus...

We present evidence of significant bias in event studies that investigate the effect of U.S. monetary policy on U.S. stock prices. To overcome this bias, we propose a new identification method based on the "Impossible Trinity" theory which argues that an economy with a fixed exchange rate and...

Financial intermediaries trade frequently in many markets using sophisticated models. Their marginal value of wealth should therefore provide a more informative stochastic discount factor (SDF) than that of a representative consumer. Guided by theory, we use shocks to the leverage of securities...

We use a sample of option prices, and the method of Bakshi, Kapadia and Madan (2003), to estimate the ex ante higher moments of the underlying individual securities' risk-neutral returns distribution. We find that individual securities' volatility, skewness, and kurtosis are strongly related to...

This paper decomposes firm-specific monthly-varying Amihud (2002) illiquidity measure into two components: (i) systematic illiquidity; (ii) idiosyncratic illiquidity. While there is a positive and significant relationship between systematic illiquidity and one-month-ahead stock returns, the...

When private information is observed by ambiguity averse investors, asset prices may be informationally inefficient in rational expectations equilibrium. This inefficiency implies lower asset prices as uninformed investors require a premium to hold assets and higher return volatility relative to...

We treat expenditures that create intangible assets as investments and instead of expensing them, we add them back to earnings when measuring the return on equity of firms while constructing the profitability factor in the Fama and French (2015) five factor model. The profitability factor we...

In this paper, we develop a novel model to forecast the volatility of S&P 500 futures returns by considering measures of limits to arbitrage. When arbitrageurs face constraints on their trading strategies, option prices can become disconnected from fundamentals, resulting in a distortion that...

Existing literature on dealer liquidity provision and inventory management has focused on dealer inventory costs. I uncover a new inventory benefit channel: dealers strategically build inventory in order to compete for market share. I assess the relative impact of the inventory benefit and costs...