We argue that incentives to take equity risk ("equity incentives") only partially capture incentives to take asset risk ("asset incentives"). This is because leverage, while central to the theory of risk shifting, is not explicitly considered by equity incentives. Employing measures of asset...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governance features in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downs of U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs had particularly...

Although examples of deception and fraud in business have generated widespread interest in themotivations for honest behavior, little is known about individual differences in the propensity totell the truth. This paper highlights the role of honesty as a protected value, maintaining thatsome...

This article examines the recent regulatory developments with regard to shortselling. Short selling regulation is an important factor in firm governancebecause it affects the way in which firms are subject to market discipline. Asthe financial crisis has attracted regulators’ notice to short...

Some people are motivated by the non-selfish, non-strategic, and non-consequentialist “sacredvalue” of Truth. We conduct the first experiment directly assessing this phenomenon. We findthat people differ substantially in their truthfulness, with a large minority powerfully inclined...

A large literature studies the predictability of stock returns by other lagged nancialvariables in a predictive regression setting. A common feature of widely used testingprocedures is a failing robustness, which may lead to misleading conclusions determinedby the particular features of a small...

We introduce a new class of flexible and tractable matrix a±ne jump-diffusions (AJD) to modelmultivariate sources of financial risk. We first provide a complete transform analysis of this model class,which opens a range of new potential applications to, e.g., multivariate option pricing with...

This paper analyzes the relation between correlation risk and the cross-section of hedge fund returns.Legal framework and investment mandate imply that hedge funds can be severely exposed tocorrelation risk: Hedge funds ability to enter long-short positions can be useful to reduce marketbeta,...

This paper examines the role of bond ratings and the effects of rating-based regulations in thecorporate bond market. Exploiting an unanticipated mechanical change in how the benchmarkLehman bond indices are constructed in 2005, we show that rating-induced market segmentationof the bond market...