Exploiting a 2014 change in credit default swap (CDS) contracts on European banks, we introduce a measure of market expectation of European government support for distressed banks. CDS contract terms were changed to cover losses from “government intervention” and related bail-in events. For...

We analyze methods for selecting topics in news articles to explain stock returns. We find, through empirical and theoretical results, that supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (sLDA) implemented through Gibbs sampling in a stochastic EM algorithm will often overfit returns to the detriment of...

We study the behavior of linear discriminant functions for binary classification in the infinite-imbalance limit, where the sample size of one class grows without bound while the sample size of the other remains fixed. The coefficients of the classifier minimize an expected loss specified...

We analyze the error between a discretely rebalanced portfolio and its continuously rebalanced counterpart in the presence of jumps or mean-reversion in the underlying asset dynamics. With discrete rebalancing, the portfolio's composition is restored to a set of fixed target weights at discrete...

Financial risk measurement relies on models of prices and other market variables, but models inevitably rely on imperfect assumptions and estimates, creating model risk. Moreover, optimization decisions, such as portfolio selection, amplify the effect of model error. In this work, we develop a...

We develop a framework to quantify the vulnerability of mutual funds to fire-sale spillover losses. We account for the first-mover incentive that results from the mismatch between the liquidity offered to redeeming investors and the liquidity of assets held by the funds. In our framework, the...

Portfolio selection is vulnerable to the error-amplifying effects of combining optimization with statistical estimation and model error. For dynamic portfolio control, sources of model error include the evolution of market factors and the influence of these factors on asset returns. We develop...

The stationary distribution of a GARCH(1,1) process has a power law decay, under broadly applicable conditions. We study the change in the exponent of the tail decay under temporal aggregation of parameters, with the distribution of innovations held fixed. The parameter transformation we study...

The well-documented underreaction of stock prices to news exhibits substantial time variation, and comoves with institutional capital and trading motives. We show that higher risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries and lower passive ownership of stocks increase price underreaction....

We consider the problem of decomposing the credit risk in a portfolio into a sum of risk contributions associated with individual obligors or transactions. For some standard measures of risk - including value-at-risk and expected shortfall - the total risk can be usefully decomposed into a sum...