As the primary entity responsible for new legislation, Congress is capable of enacting legislation that may affect future market returns. To examine potential effects, the percentage of the House of Representatives and Senate controlled by a political party is examined. Additionally, the effect...

To understand the extent to which partisan majorities in Congress influence economic policy, we compare financial market responses in recent midterm elections to Presidential elections. We use prediction markets that track election outcomes as a means of precisely timing and calibrating the...

Economic growth is ardently emphasized as a requisite underpinning not only for improving individual income, the standard of living, and a society's infrastructure, but also to attain equitable distribution of necessities, critical resources, and public goods such as education, healthcare, and...

We analyze trading opportunities that arise from differences between the bond and the CDS market. By simultaneously entering a position in a CDS contract and the underlying bond, traders can build a default-risk free position that allows them to repeatedly earn the difference between the bond...

We elaborate economic explanations for the time-varying risk of month, quarter and year base load electricity forward contracts traded on the Nord Pool Energy Exchange from January 2006 to March 2010. Daily risk quantities are generated by decomposing realized volatility in its continuous and...

A decent budgetary portfolio is nothing more, and nothing less, than an accumulation of advantages that develop in quality and produce abundance money for the financial specialist to spend or reinvest. Markowitz (1959) is one of the pioneers of present day portfolio hypothesis. Generally, the...

Option-implied betas are a promising alternative to historical beta estimators, because they are inherently forward-looking and can incorporate new information immediately and fully. Recently, different implied beta estimators have been developed in previous literature, but very little is known...

We characterize how informed investors trade in the options market ahead of corporate news when they receive private, but noisy, information about (i) the timing of the announcement and (ii) its impact on stock prices. Our theoretical framework generates a rich set of predictions about the...

Volatilities implied from interest rate swaptions are used to assess the size and the sign of the compensation for volatility risk, for dollar, euro and pound rates at a daily frequency, between October 1998 and August 2006. The measurement of the volatility risk premium rests on a simple model...

This paper applies regression analysis to investigate the fundamental factors of the variation of CDS index tranches. The sample comprises daily data on the tranche premia of the European iTraxx and North American CDX index from the start of the market in summer 2004 to January 2008. I estimate...