We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...

We analyse daily lead-lag patterns in US equity and credit default swap (CDS) returns. We first document that equity returns robustly lead CDS returns. However, we find that the CDS-lag is due to common (and not firm-specific) news and arises predominantly in response to positive (instead of...

We investigate the effects of introducing a central clearing counterparty (CCP) on securities prices by adopting as an experimental construct the 2009 CCP reform in three Nordic markets. We find that, relative to other European economies, these countries experience market-adjusted equity returns...

We show that the presence of high frequency trading (HFT) has significantly mitigated the frequency and severity of end-of-day price dislocation, counter to recent concerns expressed in the media. The effect of HFT is more pronounced on days when end of day price dislocation is more likely to be...

We examine the impact of stock exchange trading rules and surveillance on the frequency and severity of suspected insider trading cases in 22 stock exchanges around the world over the period January 2003 through June 2011. Using new indices for market manipulation, insider trading, and...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

In this paper we provide new evidence that corporate financing decisions are associated with managerial incentives to report high equity earnings. Managers rely most heavily on debt to finance their asset growth when their future earnings prospects are poor, when they are under pressure due to...

Notwithstanding the recognized importance of traders' expectations in characterizing the observed market dynamics, for instance the formation of speculative bubbles and crashes on financial markets, little attention has been devoted so far by economists to a rigorous study of expectation...

We present results of an experiment on expectation formation in an asset market. Participants to our experiment must provide forecasts of the stock future return to computerized utility-maximizing investors, and are rewarded according to how well their forecasts perform in the market. In the...