This paper develops a new strategy for dynamically hedging interest-rate contingent claims, such as mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). The approach involves estimating the joint distribution of returns on MBSs and T-note futures, conditional on current economic conditions. We show that our...

There have been recent, well-documented cases of financial institutions and investment groups incurring huge monetary losses on their mortgage-backed security (MBS) portfolios. This vulnerability is partly due to the complexity of MBS pricing. Homeowners have the option to prepay their mortgages...

Multivariate density estimation (MDE) suggests that mortgage-backed security (MBS) prices can be well described as a function of the level and slope of the term structure. We analyze how this function varies across MBSs with different coupons. An important finding is that the interest rate level...

What moves stock prices? Prior literature concludes that the revelation of private information through trading, and not public news, is the primary driver. We revisit the question by using textual analysis to identify fundamental information in news. This information accounts for 49.6% of...

The prevailing view in finance is that the evidence for long-horizon stock return predictability is significantly stronger than that for short horizons. We show that for persistent regressors, a characteristic of most of the predictive variables used in the literature, the estimators are almost...

The forward premium anomaly is one of the most robust puzzles in financial economics. We recast the underlying parity relation in terms of cross-country differences between forward interest rates rather than spot interest rates with dramatic results. These forward interest rate differentials...

Previous research showed that the dividend price ratio process changed remarkably during the 1980's and 1990's, but that the total payout ratio (dividends plus repurchases over price) changed very little. We investigate implications of this difference for asset pricing models. In particular, the...

The behavioral finance literature cites the frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) futures market as a prominent example of the failure of prices to reflect fundamentals. This paper reexamines the relation between FCOJ futures returns and fundamentals, focusing primarily on temperature. We show...

A basic tenet of financial economics is that asset prices change in response to unexpected fundamental information. Since Roll's (1988) provocative presidential address that showed little relation between stock prices and news, however, the finance literature has had limited success reversing...

This paper addresses the question of how an institution might optimally manage the market risk of a given exposure. We provide an analytical approach to optimal risk management under the assumption that the institution wishes to minimize its Value-at-Risk (VaR) using options follows a geometric...