We offer a new account for the well-documented empirical fact that people display inconsistent risk preferences. Our approach is to apply a theory of focusing (Kőszegi and Szeidl, 2013) to choice under risk. In our model, the decision maker may focus more on (and thus overweight) the upside or...

Using portfolios that are formed by directly sorting stocks based on their exposure to characteristics-based factors, earlier studies find that these beta-sorted portfolios have very large ex post factor beta spreads. However, the return spreads between high- and low-beta firms are typically...

China's four-trillion-yuan stimulus package fueled by bank loans in 2009 has led to the rapid growth of shadow banking activities after 2012. Local governments financed the stimulus through bank loans in 2009, and resorted to non-bank debt financing after 2012 given the rollover pressure from...

The upsurge of shadow banking is typically driven by rising financing demand from certain real sectors. In China, the four-trillion-yuan stimulus package in 2009 was behind the rapid growth of shadow banking after 2012, expediting the development of Chinese corporate bond markets in the...

We construct a traded funding liquidity measure from stock returns. Guided by a model, we extract the measure as the return spread between two beta-neutral portfolios constructed using stocks with high and low margin, to control for stocks' sensitivities to the aggregate funding shocks. Our...

We evaluate the performance of various methods for estimating factor returns in an approximate factor model. Differences across estimators are most pronounced when there is cross-sectional heteroskedasticity, or when cross-sectional sample sizes, n, are below 4,000 assets. Estimators...

People feel hopeless if, relative to a reference point, the probability for the final consequence to exceed the reference point, either by subsequent action or unresolved uncertainty, is zero. This paper defines hopelessness aversion as tendency to avoid falling into such hopeless states and...

This paper investigates the source of price momentum in the stock market using information from options markets. We provide direct evidence of the gradual information diffusion model in Hong and Stein (1999): momentum profits are larger for stocks whose information diffuses slowly into the stock...

Although it may be difficult for households to instantaneously adjust their stock of durable goods, they have much more latitude in adjusting the service flow from that stock. In contrast to past studies that assume service flow to be a constant fraction of the stock, we model the utilization of...

We exploit a unique dataset of country-specific military expenditures and construct a proxy for international instability, measured as the growth of the global military expenditure to GDP ratio, to capture political tensions and international conflicts. Using the market indices of 44 countries,...