We outline key steps necessary to reform the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) so as to improve its robustness to manipulation. We first discuss the role of financial benchmarks such as LIBOR in promoting over-the-counter market efficiency by improving transparency. We then describe how to...

We study the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the term structure of nominal interest rates. We develop a general equilibrium model, in which both the government and the central bank policy decisions are driven by uncertainty shocks. Our affine yield curve model captures both the shape of...

In an attempt to understand the impact of derivative market reforms, this paper focuses on the spreads of centrally cleared CDSs using a unique data set of voluntarily cleared non-financial single-name contracts over the period from January 2009 to June 2013. Controlling for a number of factors...

Stock market makers are afraid that informed insiders will take advantage of them in trade. To protect themselves, they may increase the bid-offer spread to include a fee for the adverse selection risk . If set correctly, market makers will share in profits from others trading on private...

This paper analyzes the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the term structure of real and nominal interest rates. We derive a general equilibrium model where the real side of the economy is driven by government policy uncertainty and the central bank sets money supply endogenously...

Implicit in interest rate derivatives are Arrow-Debreu prices (or state price densities, SPDs) that contain fundamental information for risk and portfolio management in interest rate markets. To extract such information from interest rate derivatives, we propose a non-parametric method to...

This paper examines the relationship between the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and VIX futures term structure and shows that the latter can early indicate changes in the effect of political uncertainty. Specifically, a hump-shaped pattern in VIX futures term structure around the Election, with...

Mispricing and risk have both been suggested as explanations for the cross-sectional relation between stock returns and firm characteristics such as accruals. As emphasized by Ferson and Harvey (1998) and Berk, Green and Naik (1999), it is difficult to evaluate these competing explanations...

We document that historical patterns of accruals seasonality predict future stock returns. Firms with historically larger accruals in a given quarter of the year earn lower stock returns when those accruals are expected to be announced. The accruals seasonality spread is significant only in the...

Utilizing subsets of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, purely as market-makers, and as both, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' marketmaking role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We find...