A sharp increase in the popularity of commodity investing in the past decade has triggered an unprecedented inflow of institutional funds into commodity futures markets, referred to as the financialization of commodities. In this paper, we explore the effects of financialization in a model that...

Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this...

This paper examines if overreaction of oil price forecasters is affected by uncertainty. Furthermore, it takes into account joint effects of uncertainty and oil price returns on forecast changes. The panel smooth transition regression model from Gonz alez et al. (2005) is applied with univariate...

In a production economy with trade in financial markets motivated by the desire to share labor-income risk and to speculate, we show that speculation increases volatility of asset returns and investment growth, increases the equity risk premium, and reduces welfare. Regulatory measures, such as...

We develop a model of asset trading with financial leverage in an economy with a continuum of investors. The investors are assumed to have diverse and rational beliefs in the sense of being compatible with observed data. We show that a reduction in the margin requirement may cause the stock...

This study finds that stock return volatility is higher during periods of high tax policy uncertainty (TPU), even after controlling for other sources of general macroeconomic uncertainty. Further, we find that the relation between TPU and stock return volatility is more pronounced where firms...

The financial services industry is among the leading industries in IT-spending. Still, little research exists which investigates how IT influences the financial services sector. Against this background, we study how a technology which emerged within the last years affects securities trading:...

This study shows that market volatility affects stock returns both directly and indirectly through its impact on liquidity provision and the negative relation between market volatility and stock returns arises not only from greater risk premiums but also greater illiquidity premiums that are...

Algorithms enable investors to locate trading opportunities, which raises gains from trade. Algorithmic traders can also process information on stock values before slow traders, which generates adverse selection. We model trading in this context and show that, for a given level of algorithmic...

The current research assesses the risks commonly attributed to the presence of HFT in the context of different market structures deployed by the U.S. exchanges. In particular, we find that, by design, the so-called “normal” exchanges have the lowest market quality, including the highest...