Remarks at the Third Annual Connecticut Bank and Trust Company Economic Outlook Breakfast, Hartford, Connecticut.

The proposal for banks to issue contingent capital that must convert into common equity when the banks' stock price falls below a specified threshold, or "trigger," does not in general lead to a unique equilibrium in equity and contingent capital prices. Multiple or no equilibrium arises because...

I study long-short portfolio strategies formed on seven different stock characteristics representing various measures of past returns, value, and size. Each individual characteristic results in a profitable portfolio strategy, but these single-characteristic strategies are all dominated by a...

We develop a DSGE model in which aggregate shocks induce endogenous movements in risk. The key feature of our model is that households rebalance their financial portfolio allocations infrequently, as they face a fixed cost of transferring cash across accounts. We show that the model can account...

In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the parent company's stock price to drop by as much as 76...

This paper tests a two-part hypothesis: first, that during the period between publication of the risk-based capital requirements in early 1989 and the end of 1992, bank holding companies (BHCs) faced a statistically significant decrease in stock returns if they issued new common stock; second,...

Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its...