This paper argues that liquidity events in short selling, such as short squeezes, margin calls, and stock specialness, may be an important part of short-selling constraints. We gauge the importance of liquidity events by utilizing a market-based measure, which is the cost of using options to...

This paper investigates the effects of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) hedging activity on interest-rate volatility and proposes a model that takes these effects into account. An empirical examination suggests that the inclusion of information about MBS considerably improves model performance...

Existing evidence suggests that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) may be beneficial to U.S. investors, but that foreign firms are perhaps less likely to list in the U.S. after SOX. This raises the question of whether foreign firms avoid listing in the U.S. after SOX because the Act imposes...

This study examines empirically whether individuals consider their perceptions of potential counterparties' trustworthiness when deciding to transact in an environment with extensive contract enforcement mechanisms. This is a non-trivial empirical question because, as observed by Carlin,...

We show that microstructure biases in the estimation of expected option returns and risk premia are large, in some cases over 50 basis points per day. We propose a new method that corrects for these biases. We then apply our method to real data and produce three main findings. First, the...

We successfully replicate the main results of Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006): Aggregate-volatility risk and idiosyncratic volatility (IV) are each priced in the cross-section of stock returns from 1963 to 2000. We also examine the pricing of volatility outside the original time period and...

We show that a simple, intuitive variable, GVD (Goliath versus David) reflects time-variation in discount rates related to changes in aggregate business conditions. GVD is the annual change in the weight of the largest 250 firms in the aggregate stock market, and is motivated by research that...

The common-factor hypothesis is one possible explanation for the strong observed housing wealth effect. Under this hypothesis, house price appreciation is statistically related to changes in consumption as long as the available proxies for the common driver of housing and non-housing demand are...

This paper investigates attitudes towards gender, ethnicity, weight, and age in the U.S. from peer-to-peer credit markets. With detailed data on both the lending decision and loan performance, we are substantially better able to distinguish between taste based discrimination consistent with...

We empirically test for the presence of two types of financial contagion across large broker-dealers and dealer banks during the crisis of 2007-2009: the type based on the idea that market illiquidity mediates the spread of distress from one dealer to others, or, “liquidity contagion”, and...