We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds...

This paper examines whether investors receive compensation for holding crash-sensitive stocks. We capture the crash sensitivity of stocks by their lower tail dependence (LTD) with the market based on copulas. We find that stocks with strong LTD have higher average future returns than stocks with...

This paper examines U.S. REIT leverage decisions and their effects on risk and return. We find that REITs are highly levered relative to industrial firms, with an average market leverage of 46 percent over our 1990-2012 sample period. Using partial adjustment models, we further find that the...

Managed portfolios are subject to tail risks, which can be either index level (systematic) or fund-specific. Examples of fund-specific extreme events include those due to big bets or fraud. This paper studies the two components in relation to compensation structure in managed portfolios. A...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

We study liquidity provision by dealers in a dynamic model of asset markets. When economic fundamentals are high (low), dealers provide more (less) liquidity by holding more (less) inventory, the market is liquid (illiquid), and interdealer trading is active (inactive). When fundamentals are...

Return jumps on equities exhibit slowly-decaying tail behavior admitting severe downside risk; moreover, heavy-tailed jump size distributions governing these rare events pose further challenges to econometric estimation. This paper formulates a portfolio choice problem in a multi-asset...

The capital structure arbitrage strategy exploits the discrepancies between the credit default swap and equity markets. It assumes that both markets instantaneously react to new information, so it fails to take into account the lead-lag relationships between the prices in the two markets and...

This paper develops useful theory of arbitrage and risk arbitrage. It describes a prize winning successful risk arbitrage involving Nikkei put warrants trading on the Toronto and American stock exchanges. The paper describes the various types of contracts and how the risk arbitrage was traded...

Our paper provides a complete characterization of leverage and default in binomial economies with financial assets serving as collateral. Our Binomial No-Default Theorem states that any equilibrium is equivalent (in real allocations and prices) to another equilibrium in which there is no...