It appears that volatility in equity markets is asymmetric: returns and conditional volatility are negatively correlated. We provide a unified framework to simultaneously investigate asymmetric volatility at the firm and the market level and to examine two potential explanations of the...

In this paper we study risk management based on the quantile regression. Unlike the traditional VaR estimation methods, the quantile regression approach allows for a general treatment on the error distribution and is robust to distributions with heavy tails. We estimate the VaRs of five...

Using a novel information asymmetry index based on measures of adverse selection developed by the market microstructure literature, we test whether information asymmetry is an important determinant of capital structure decisions, as suggested by the pecking order theory. Our index relies...