This paper examines the hypothesis that both stock returns and volatility are asymmetrical functions of past information from the US market. By employing a double-threshold GARCH model to investigate six major index-return series, we find strong evidence supporting the asymmetrical hypothesis of stock returns. Specifically, negative news from the US market will cause a larger decline in a natio...

Analysis of the economic effects of constitutional rules has made substantial progress over the last decade. This survey provides an overview of this rapidly growing research area and also discusses a number of methodological issues and identifies underresearched areas. It argues that the next logical step of Positive Constitutional Economics is to endogenize constitutional rules. JEL classific...

Article history: This paper explores whether the relevance of a conditional multifacReceived 12 July 2012 tor model and autocorrelation in predicting the Russian aggregate Received in revised form 2 October 2012 stock return fluctuates over time. The source of return predictability is Accepted 16 December 2012 shown to vary considerably with information flow. In general, Available online 22 Dec...

We comprehensively examine the effects of stock return volatility on firms’ financial and investment decisions. Consistent with theories of investment with financing frictions, firms with high volatility actively reduce their leverage, cut investment, increase cash holding, cut non-cash current assets such as inventories and account receivables, and cut dividend. The effects of volatility are s...

Using a new hand-collected data set, this study examines the stock price manipulation in the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE). We examine the characteristics of the manipulated stocks, and their impacts on market quality. The results show that manipulated stocks tend to be small. The stock prices rise throughout the manipulation period, followed by a price reversal. The average cumulative abnormal r...

We investigate non-linearities in the stock return trading volume relationship by using daily data for 16 European countries in an asymmetric vector autoregressive model. In this framework, we test for asymmetries and analyze the dynamic relationship using a simulation based procedure for computing asymmetric impulse response functions. We find that stock returns have a significant influence on...

We develop a GARCH option model with a variance premium by combining the HestonNandi (2000) dynamic with a new pricing kernel. While the pricing kernel is monotonic in the stock return and in variance, its projection onto the stock return is nonmonotonic. A negative variance premium makes it appear U-shaped. We present new semi-parametric evidence to confirm this U-shaped relationship between t...

We study the cross-sectional dispersion in daily stock returns, or daily return dispersion (RD). Our primary empirical contribution is to demonstrate that RD contains reliable incremental information about the future traditional volatility of both firm-level and portfolio-level returns. The relation between RD and future stock volatility is pervasive across time and across different industry po...

Risk Tolerance and Entrepreneurship A tradition from Knight (1921) argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but perform worse. We test these predictions with two risk tolerance proxies: stock market participation and personal leverage. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we find that common stock investors are around 50 percent more likely t...

This paper examines the hypothesis that both stock returns and volatility are asymmetric functions of past information derived from domestic and US stock-market news. The evidence finds the presence of negative autocorrelation, which is consistent with the dominance of positive-feedback trading behavior. By employing a double-threshold autoregressive GARCH model to investigate four major index-...