We examine the pricing of financial crash insurance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis in U.S. option markets, and we show that a large amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the cost of financial sector crash insurance during the crisis. The difference in costs between...

We study how sophisticated investors, when faced with changes in information environment, adjust their information acquisition and trading behavior, and how these changes in turn affect market efficiency. We find that, after exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures of brokerage...

We propose a new modeling approach for the cross section of returns. Our method, Instrumented Principal Components Analysis (IPCA), allows for latent factors and time-varying loadings by introducing observable characteristics that instrument for the unobservable dynamic loadings. If the...

We define and construct a credit-implied volatility (CIV) surface from the firm-by-maturity panel of CDS spreads. We use this framework to organize the behavior of corporate credit markets into three stylized facts. First, CIV exhibits a steep moneyness smirk. Second, the joint dynamics of...

We document a form of excess volatility that is difficult to reconcile with standard models of prices, even after accounting for variation in discount rates. We compare prices of claims on the same cash flow stream but with different maturities. Standard models impose precise internal...

We perform a comparative analysis of machine learning methods for the canonical problem of empirical asset pricing: measuring asset risk premia. We demonstrate large economic gains to investors using machine learning forecasts, in some cases doubling the performance of leading regression-based...

We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify significant patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to previous and subsequent work: these patents are distinct from previous work but are...

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking...

We study the pricing of uncertainty shocks using a wide-ranging set of options that reveal premia for macroeconomic risks. Portfolios hedging macro uncertainty have historically earned zero or even significantly positive returns, while those exposed to the realization of large shocks have earned...

Several papers argue that financial economics faces a replication crisis because the majority of studies cannot be replicated or are the result of multiple testing of too many factors. We develop and estimate a Bayesian model of factor replication, which leads to different conclusions. The...