Recently, commodity index investing has come under attack. A Staff Report by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (hereafter, the “subcommittee report”) “…finds that there is significant and persuasive evidence to conclude that these commodity index traders, in the...

A firm's incentive to disclose has been linked empirically to a range of variables including information asymmetry, agency costs, political costs, and proprietary costs. While the intuition underlying each of the variables seems plausible, Verrecchia (2001) argues that disclosure models can be...

This paper provides a method for testing for regime differences when regimes are long-lasting. Standard testing procedures are generally inappropriate because regime persistence causes a spurious regression problem - a problem that has led to incorrect inference in a broad range of studies...

A number of seemingly unrelated commodities experienced simultaneous price spikes recently. Congress investigated the increase in prices and concluded that the price increases were not attributable to fundamentals but rather to commodity index investing. The purpose of this study is to evaluate...

Whether Republican or Democratic presidents are better for the the stock market has been closely scrutinized for years. Although much of it is discussed only in casual terms, a recent academic study by Santa Clara and Valkanov (2003) documenting that the market does significantly better under...