We investigate the risk and return of a variety of trading strategies involving options on the Samp;P 500. Overall, we find that strategies that short options constitute very good deals. However, exploiting these good deals can be extremely difficult. Trading costs and margin requirements...

In this paper we study how corporate bond defaults can be predicted using financial ratios and how the estimated default probability relates to the Fama-French factors, HML and SMB. We propose a default forecast model that outperforms existing models in correctly classifying both Default and...

We show that a platform-pays mechanism can address ratings inflation and ratings shopping with minimum regulatory oversight. While we focus on ratings industry, the mechanism also applies to a setting where firms seek unbiased reports from external auditors. The mechanism has two necessary and...

Negative policy spillovers can undermine the social effectiveness of well-intentioned regulations. We evaluate whether environmental regulations that shifted electricity generation from coal to natural gas, reducing emissions, had an effect on electricity price volatility. We use emergency...

Non-financial corporations typically cite risk management as the primary reason for their derivatives use. If hedging programs are effective, then firms using derivatives should have lower credit risk than those that do not. Consistent with this idea, we find that CDS spreads are lower for firms...

We use contract negotiation data to study how leverage affects the interaction between firms and an important non-financial stakeholder, labor unions. Consistent with the idea that leverage diminishes the bargaining position of labor, we find that unions are less likely to strike when a firm has...

The market for Auction Rate Securities (ARS) made headlines during the second week of February 2008 when auctions, at which the bonds interest rates are reset, experienced a wave of ldquo;failures.rdquo; Contrary to headlines that attribute the failures to a ldquo;frozenrdquo; market and/or to...

In sparse large-scale testing problems where the false discovery proportion (FDP) is highly variable, the false discovery exceedance (FDX) provides a valuable alternative to the widely used false discovery rate (FDR). We develop an empirical Bayes approach to controlling the FDX. We show that...