Corporate risk hedging with forward contracts increases value by reducing incentives to underinvest. This occurs because the hedge decreases the sensitivity of senior claim value to incremental investment, allowing equity holders to capture a larger portion of the incremental benefit from new...

Trade execution costs remain larger on NASDAQ compared to the NYSE in the wake of new SEC-mandated order-handling rules and reductions in tick sizes, but the differential across markets is smaller than in earlier years. Cross-sectional regression analysis indicates that the differences in...

We document a pattern in the serial dependence of security returns around nontrading days. The correlation of returns the second day after a weekend or holiday with returns the first day after is unusually low, and in many return series is negative, implying a reversal of price movements. We...

We compare average trade execution costs during 1994 for sets of large, medium, and small capitalization stocks listed on the New York and NASDAQ stock markets. All measures of execution costs examined, including quoted bid-ask spreads, effective spreads (which allow for executions within the...

The well-documented abnormal long-run buy-and-hold returns to firms issuing equity in initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings, firms bidding in mergers, and firms initiating dividends can be attributed to imperfect control-firm matching. In addition to firm size and market-to-book...

For decades, corporate bonds primarily traded in an opaque environment. Quotations, which indicate prices at which dealers are willing to transact, were available only to market professionals, most often by telephone. Prices at which bond transactions were completed were not made public. The...

I examine the uniformity of risk pricing in futures and asset markets. Tests against a general alternative do not reject complete integration of futures and asset markets. As predicted, estimates of the "zero-beta" rate for futures are close to zero, and premiums for systematic risk do not...

This article refocuses attention on the potential efficiency gains from competitive wholesale power trading, which allows the diversification of demand risk. The greatest efficiency gains obtain when power demand is least correlated across markets and when there is substantial cross-sectional...