Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...

This paper analyzes the asset pricing implications of periodic cash payouts within the context of a stationary rational expectations model with heterogeneous investors. The periodicity of cash payouts provides a natural motivation for time-varying conditional volatility in stock returns. I show...

The ad hoc Black-Scholes (AHBS) model is one of the most widely used option valuation models among practitioners models. The main contribution of this study is methodological. We have two main results: (1) we make the empirical observation that typically the call and put sneers are discontinuous...

Sudden big price changes are followed by periods of high and persistent volatility. I develop a tractable dynamic rational expectations model consistent with this observation. An infinity of agents possess dispersed information about future dividends and trade in centralized markets. Information...

This paper studies the impact that pre-IPO cash flow volatility has on the initial and long-term value of a publicly traded firm. From the perspective of corporate risk management theory, higher cash flow volatility should reduce value in the form of higher borrowing costs, reduced investment,...

We find that weekend, holiday and overnight trading breaks generate excessive perceived risk in the option markets, presumably due to asymmetric information, which, in turn, encourages uninformed option traders to postpone trading. This perceived risk subsides after two days accompanied by an...

We propose a tractable equilibrium model to examine how margin requirements affectasset prices, market volatility, and market participants' welfare. Weshow that margin requirements can have opposite effects on market volatility whenthey constrain different investors and thus can help explain why...

The accurate forecast of the foreign currencies exchange rates at the ultra high frequency electronic trading in the foreign currencies exchange markets is a main topic of our research: 1) the present state of the foreign currencies exchange markets in Asia, Europe and North America; 2) the...

We investigate the dynamics of heterogeneous beliefs and link them to the volatility pattern throughout the seasoned equity offering (SEO) event window. In sync with a reduction in information asymmetry related to management information releases around the SEO event, belief heterogeneity...