It is commonly believed that the response of the price of corn ethanol (and hence of the price of corn) to shifts in biofuel policies operates in part through market expectations and shifts in storage demand, yet to date it has proved difficult to measure these expectations and to empirically...

This paper shows that changes in market participants' fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and...

We develop a simulation-based procedure to test for stock return predictability with multiple regressors. The process governing the regressors is left completely free and the test procedure remains valid in small samples even in the presence of non-normalities and GARCH-type effects in the stock...

Studies such as Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) demonstrate how stable firms' capital structures are over time, and raise the question of whether new theories of capital structure are needed to explain these phenomena. In this paper, I show that trade-off theory-based empirical proxies that...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

This paper studies the effects of a monetary policy expansion in the United States during times of high financial stress. The analysis is carried out by introducing a smooth transition factor model where the transition between states (“normal” and high financial stress) depends on a...

We present CoMargin, a new methodology to estimate collateral requirements for central counterparties (CCPs) in derivatives markets. CoMargin depends on both the tail risk of a given market participant and its interdependence with other participants. Our approach internalizes market...

We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades. In contrast to theories of STT imposition as a means to reduce...

This paper explores the volatility forecasting implications of a model in which the friction in high-frequency prices is related to the true underlying volatility. The contribution of this paper is to propose a framework under which the realized variance may improve volatility forecasting if the...

This paper proposes new measures of the integrated variance, measures which use high-frequency bid-ask spreads and quoted depths. The traditional approach assumes that the mid-quote is a good measure of frictionless price. However, the recent high-frequency econometric literature takes the...