We estimate the slope of the demand curve for newly auctioned FHLB discount notes and investigate the impacts of arbitrage risk and heterogeneity of investor beliefs on demand elasticity. Our unique dataset of roughly 2,900 observations of two price-quantity pairs - the first from a pre-auction...

We find that small buy trades of U.S. agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are priced 3%-8% lower than large sell trades. No such “crossing” exists in corporate bonds and agency debentures. We attribute the MBS price patterns to impediments to position aggregation in combination with...

We study potential fraudulent mismarking of newly purchased odd lot and two classes of round lot positions in structured products. Such mismarking artificially inflates net asset values and overstates cumulative returns. Applied to mutual funds launched after January 2010, a simulation-tested...

Investment bankers focus on narrow, industry-based peer groups for individual stock valuation. And some market-neutral equity hedge fund managers restrict their portfolios to be sector-neutral as well. Yet, academic research into contrarian strategy investment performance has typically invoked...

We analyze the dispersion of month-end prices simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after initiations of TRACE and introductions of issuers into Markit's CDS database. Disseminated bonds show large and statistically significant...

We analyze the dispersion of month-end price marks simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after initiations of TRACE and introductions of issuers into Markit's CDS database. Disseminated bonds show large and statistically significant...

We study the dispersion of month-end valuations placed on identical corporate bonds by different mutual funds. Such dispersion is related to bond-specific characteristics associated with liquidity and market volatility. TRACE may have contributed to the general decline in dispersion over our...

This paper investigates the trading behavior of major market participants - both dealers and customers - during the six-month period of a well-publicized market manipulation episode: an attempted delivery squeeze in a bond futures contract traded in London. The analyses are based on a rich...

The Russian GKO default crisis provides a unique window into the impact of changing default probabilities and recovery ratio assumptions on credit-sensitive sovereign bond prices. This paper introduces a joint implied parameter approach to extract both the expected recovery ratio and the default...

This paper examines the spreading and pricing of short-term interest rate futurescontracts and shows how traditional types of calendar spread positions can emerge as explicit arbitrage solutions. A specific set of intuitive spreading structures - quot;Pascal's Spreading Trianglequot; arises when...