This paper discusses the extent to which derivatives pose threats to firms and to the economy. After reviewing the derivatives markets and putting in perspective the various measures of the size of these markets, the paper shows who uses derivatives and why. The difficulties firms face in...

We examine whether hedge funds experience contagion. First, we consider whether extreme movements in equity, fixed income, and currency markets are contagious to hedge funds. Second, we investigate whether extreme adverse returns in one hedge fund style are contagious to other hedge fund styles....

Past research has shown that the level of operating accruals is a negative cross-sectional predictor of future stock returns. This paper examines whether the accruals anomaly extends to the aggregate stock market. In contrast with cross-sectional findings, there is no indication that aggregate...

We provide a model with overconfident risk neutral investors, and therefore no risk premia, in which a price-based portfolio such as HML earns positive expected returns and loads on fundamental macroeconomic variables. Furthermore, loadings on such portfolios are proxies for mispricing and...

We test whether short-sellers in U.S. stocks are able to predict future returns based on new SEC-mandated data for 2005. There is a tremendous amount of short-selling activity during the sample: short-sales represent 24 percent of NYSE and 31 percent of Nasdaq share volume. Short-sellers...

We re-examine the co-movements of index options and futures quotes first studied in Bakshi, Cao, and Chen (2000). We show that the frequency of quote co-movements that are inconsistent with standard option pricing models is significantly higher around option trades. We examine empirically two...

Despite the dramatic reduction in explicit barriers to international investment activity over the last 60 years, the impact of financial globalization has been remarkably limited. I argue that country attributes are still critical to financial decision-making because of what I call the twin...

We consider IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 and examine the evolution of their insider ownership over time to understand better why and how U.S. firms that become widely held do so. In our sample, a majority of firms has insider ownership below 20% after ten years. We find that a firm’s stock...

We introduce Indirect Robust Generalized Method of Moments (IRGMM), a new simulation-based estimation methodology, to model short-term interest rate processes. The primary advantage of IRGMM relative to classical estimators of the continuous-time short-rate diffusion processes is that it...

We provide a model in which a single psychological constraint, limited investor attention, explains both under- and over-reaction to different earnings components. Investor neglect of information in current-period earnings about future earnings induces postearnings announcement drift, the...