This paper uses MSA level data and a panel VAR model to analyze the dynamic determination and impact of the volatility of single-family home value appreciation. We find that the volatility can be magnified by an exogenous increase in the home appreciation rate, responds to changes in the population growth rate, and is serially correlated. Moreover, an exogenous increase in the volatility increa...

Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We model this behavior as familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases. More importantly, equilibrium stock prices reflect an unfamiliarity premium. In an international setting, our model predicts t...

Resampling implementation of a stress-scenario approach to estimating portfolio default loss distributions is proposed as the basis for estimates of the appropriate absolute level of economic capital allocations for portfolio credit risk. Estimates are presented for stress scenarios of varying severity and implications of different time horizons are analyzed. Results for a numeraire portfolio a...

This paper documents order submission strategies during the Toronto Stock Exchange’s pre-opening session. I find that the registered trader (RT) actively participates in the market opening despite not being able to set the opening price directly and not having an apparent informational advantage. I find that RT opening trades are profitable, are able to moderate overnight price changes, and may...

We uncover significant effects of jump risk on conditional equity premium. Realized volatility due to negative or “bad” (positive or “good”) jumps in stock market prices predicts a rising (falling) near-term equity premium. The forecasting power of signed jump risk measures remains statistically significant even when we control for variance risk premium that Drechsler and Yaron (2011) attribute...

During the latter part of the 1990s the introduction of the euro, the dramatic increase in the supply of venture capital in most EU countries, and the creation of several ‘new’ equity markets targeted at innovative firms have dramatically transformed the financing prospects of European entrepreneurial firms. In this study we contribute to a deeper understanding of their actual relevance by (i) ...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the necessity to posit a specific utility function to describe investor's preferences and it does not impo...

We show that firm-level short interest predicts negative returns for individual stocks during economic expansions, while aggregate short interest predicts negative market returns during recessions. Viewing short sellers as informed traders, these findings are consistent with Kacperczyk, Van Nieuwerburgh, and Veldkamp’s (2016) model in which rational yet cognitively constrained traders optimally...

This paper aims at testing the influence of Subprime Crisis on Chinese stock market returns. By means of newly proposed time series spatial analysis methodology, we investigate the dominance behavior of daily returns on both Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Component Index between before and after the crisis. Little spatial dominance could be found, even consi...

In this paper, we correct part (b) of Theorem 6 of Grossman and Stiglitz (GS, 1980). We demonstrate that when the private signal tends to be perfect, the market converges to strong-form efficiency, and thus informed and uninformed traders have almost homogeneous beliefs about the stock payoff, but there is still significant net trade, rather than no trade as erroneously shown by GS. We further ...