When volatility feedback is taken into account, there is strong evidence of a positive tradeoff between stock market volatility and expected returns on a market portfolio. In this paper, we ask whether this intertemporal tradeoff between risk and return is responsible for the reported evidence of mean reversion in stock prices. There are two relevant findings. First, price movements not related...

The representative-agent Lucas model stresses aggregate risk and hence does not allow us to study the impact of agents’ heterogeneity on the dynamics of equilibrium trading volume. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions non-informational heterogeneity, i.e., differences in preferences and endowments, leads to nontrivial trading volume in equilibrium. We present a non-informational ...

This paper explores the relationship between founding family ownership and stock market returns. Using the entire population of non-financial firms listed on the Swiss stock market for 2003–2013, we find that the stock returns of family firms are significantly higher than those of non-family firms after adjusting the returns for different risk factors and firm characteristics. Family firms gene...

Correlated defaults and systemic risk are clearly priced in credit portfolio securities such as CDOs or index CDSs. In this paper we study an extensive CDX data set for evidence whether correlated defaults are also present in the underlying CDS market. We develop a cash flow based top-down approach for modeling CDSs from which we can derive the following major contributions: (I) Correlated defa...

This paper studies the asymptotic behaviour of an affine stochastic functional differential equation modelling the evolution of the cumulative return of a risky security. In the model, the traders of the security determine their investment strategy by comparing short– and long–run moving averages of the security’s returns. We show that the cumulative returns either obey the Law of the Iterated ...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note that regulation imposes an effective cap on banks’ equity volatility. Because the portfolios of small ba...

A market with asymmetric information can be viewed as a repeated exchange game between the informed sector and the uninformed one. In a market with risk-neutral agents, De Meyer [2010] proves that the price process should be a particular kind of Brownian martingale called CMMV. This type of dynamics is due to the strategic use of their private information by the informed agents. In the current ...

This paper establishes a link between firms' capital investment decisions, the quality of the information they provide to a competitive market for their shares, and their cost of capital. We show that, if firms select projects to maximize share price, higher information quality reduces the cost of capital. The intuition is that better information improves the coordination between firms and inve...

We study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances. Policymakers’ equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election. Typically, incentives to influence election results are stronger closer to the election (for a given reputation level), as...

While a mutual fund’s investment style influences the returns it generates, little is known about how a manager’s execution of the style decision affects portfolio performance. Using both holdingsand returns-based techniques to measure the consistency with which managers approach their investment mandates, we demonstrate that, on average, more style-consistent funds significantly outperform les...