In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies - momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns - a...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used in intermediating the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

We propose exact simulation-based procedures for: (i) testing mean-variance efficiency when the zero-beta rate is unknown, and (ii) building confidence intervals for the zero-beta rate. On observing that this parameter may be weakly identified, we propose LR-type statistics as well as...

We develop a model for pricing securities whose value may depend simultaneously on equity, interest rate, and default risks. The framework may also be used to extract probabilities of default (PD) functions from market data. Our approach is entirely based on observables such as equity prices and...

This paper provides evidence that reference price distributions can predict stocks' expected returns. We develop a model based on the disposition effect by considering shareholders' trading activities with different relative capital gains. The model suggests that both disposition-prone...

During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

Distortions introduced by limited liability towards higher volatility and kurtosis, increased liability skewness, reduced asset skewness and an incentive to decorrelate assets from liabilities are demonstrated in the context of a stylized model. The concept of acceptable risks operationalized by...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...