We study the effect of an asset's volatility on the expected returns of European options written on the asset. A simple stochastic discount factor model suggests that the effect differs depending on whether variations in volatility are due to variations in systematic or idiosyncratic volatility....

Many studies report that American option investors often exercise their positions suboptimally late. Yet, when that can happen in case of puts, there is an arbitrage opportunity in perfect markets, exploitable by longing the asset-and-riskfree-asset portfolio replicating the put and shorting the...

We exploit wrinkles of a contracting framework to show how access to collateral shapes the composition of corporate borrowing and the demographics of credit access. France's Ordonnance 2006-346 repudiated the 200-year old Napoleonic security code, easing the pledge of hard assets in a country...

We use a stochastic frontier model to obtain a stock-level estimate of the difference between a firm's installed production capacity and its optimal capacity. We show that this “capacity overhang” estimate relates significantly negatively to the cross-section of stock returns, even when...

This study constructs a novel dataset of bankruptcy filings for a large sample of non-US firms in 14 developed markets and sheds new light on the cross-sectional relation between default risk and stock returns. Using the reduced-form approach of Campbell et al. (2008) to estimate default...

In this paper, we decompose return premia into day and night components based on a sample of more than 48,000 stocks from 35 countries including the United States. Day returns are higher than night returns, but have similar volatility. Payoffs to value- or equally-weighted investment strategies...

We offer evidence suggesting a significantly negative relation between firm-level distress risk and the cross-section of corporate bond returns, analogous to the often negative relation between distress risk and stock returns found in prior studies ("distress anomaly"). Our evidence casts doubts...

We study the asset pricing implications of being able to optimally early exercise a plain-vanilla put option, contrasting the expected returns of equivalent American and European put options. Standard pricing models with stochastic volatility and asset-value jumps suggest the expected return...

In this paper, we decompose return premia into day and night components based on a sample of more than 48,000 stocks from 35 countries including the United States. Day returns are higher than night returns, but have similar volatility. Payoffs to value- or equally-weighted investment strategies...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the Samp;P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...