Security baskets and index-lined securities are securities whose values are functions of the cash flows or values of other assets. Creation of these "composite" securities would seem to be redundant since investors can cost1ess1y replicate them. In this paper we study the existence and optimal...

The financial crisis of 2008 was caused in part by speculative investment in sophisticated derivatives. In enacting the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress sought to address the problem of speculative investment, but merely transferred that authority to various agencies, which have not yet found a...

This article shows how indicators of agents' inflation expectations can be derived from the prices of various financial instruments and presents the estimates obtained for the euro area and the United States. The results show that these metrics have reacted to economic and monetary decisions...

We analyze how speculative financial innovation affects stock prices, option prices, risk premium, market liquidity, and investor welfare in an economy with heterogeneous beliefs. When investors disagree about the covariance of the newly introduced stocks with the original stocks, we show that...