In his Berkshire Hathaway annual newsletter to investors c.20 years ago, Warren Buffett while discussing the Long Term Capital Management LTCM and Enron collapses, famously called derivatives: "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially...

Cross-sectional forecasts of conservative and optimistic biases in analyst earnings estimates predict a stock's future returns, especially for firms that are hard to value. Trading strategies--whether based on the component of analyst bias that is correlated with major return anomalies or the...

In a recent paper, Lo (2002) derives the asymptotic distribution of the Sharpe ratio under several sets of assumptions for the return-generating process. In this paper, we extend his work to the information ratio (IR), the ratio of the excess return of a portfolio over his benchmark to its...

This project explores capital markets risk exposure from water use in key industrial sectors in the Great Lakes region, represented by a subset of the region's largest companies and water users. The largest industrial water users in the Great Lakes region include (in decreasing order):...

It is well established that investors price market liquidity risk. Yet, there exists no financial claim contingent on liquidity. We propose a contract to hedge uncertainty over future transaction costs, detailing potential buyers and sellers. Introducing liquidity derivatives in Brunnermeier and...

Relying on a latent factor model with time-varying temporal dependence of systematic risk and mispricing on firm and option characteristics, we reveal economically substantial mispricing in the options market. The portfolio based on individual options alphas related to characteristics earns an...

This paper develops a new approach to explain why risk factors constructed from option returns are priced in the stock market. We decompose an option- based factor into three main components and identify the one responsible for the beta-return relationship. Applying this method to the bear risk...

In this paper, a continuous-time, structural model of a dealer-bank is presented to derive fair value equations for credit-risky financial products that are not perfectly hedged. The impact these contracts have on the dealer-bank's earnings volatility, and consequently, their solvency and...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

We explore a multi-asset jump-diffusion pricing model, combining a systemic risk asset with several conditionally independent ordinary assets. Our approach allows for analyzing and modeling a portfolio that integrates high-activity security, such as an exchange trading fund (ETF) tracking a...