This paper examines whether political events create, or resolve uncertainty in financial markets. In the few days following the surprise outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, bid-ask spreads increase, quoted depth decreases, and volatility increases. We fail...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

We cross-sectionally analyze the presence of aggregated hidden depth and trade volume in the S&P 500 and identify its key determinants. We find that the spread is the main predictor for a stock's hidden dimension, both in terms of traded and posted liquidity. Our findings moreover suggest that...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...

In March 2013, Lululemon Athletica removed its inventory of women's black yoga pants from its stores because recent shipments of the product were “too sheer.” For a company reliant on a reputation for quality, the news was devastating. Worse, the recall set off a series of PR related...

We find, unlike earlier studies, that there is no rise in the market betas of stocks that enter the S&P 500 index when the estimated factor model is that of Fama and French (1993). We also find that SMB and HML factor betas decline after the stocks are added to the index. This decline is...

Inter-dealer trading in US Treasury Securities is almost equally divided between two similar electronic trading platforms. This provides a natural experiment within which to test the propositions of Bloomfield & O'Hara (1999 and 2000) about price discovery in fragmented markets. We examine the...

Inter-dealer trading in US Treasury Securities is almost equally divided between two similar electronic trading platforms. BrokerTec is more active in the trading of 2-, 5-, and 10-year T-notes while eSpeed has more active trading in the 30-year bond. eSpeed provides a more pre-trade transparent...

This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...