Purpose: With the presence of pricing errors, the authors consider statistical inference on the variance risk premium (VRP) and the associated implied variance, constructed from the option prices and the historic returns. Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose a nonparametric kernel...

Overconfidence and overextrapolation are two behavioral biases that are pervasive in human thinking. A long line of research documents that such biases influence business decisions by distorting managers' expected productivity. We propose a new mechanism in which the biases change firms'...

This paper investigates two successive reforms in China -- 2001 board independence and 2005 share structure -- to study their joint effects on corporate performance as ownership concentration declines. We find that both independent directors and ownership concentration ratios are individually...

In this paper, we shed new light on the role of monetary policy in asset pricing by examining the case where investors have heterogeneous expectations about future monetary policy. This case is realistic, because central banks are typically less than perfectly open on their intentions....