Search Results
Working Paper
Concentrated shareholdings and the number of outside analysts
Assuming some fixed cost to information acquisition, diffuse shareholders in publicly held firms have little incentive to produce information that can substitute for the services of financial analysts. However, we argue that concentrated shareholdings, either by outsiders like institutions or by inside managers, reduce the demand for analyst services. The former group finds it worthwhile to produce its own information and avoid any moral hazard problems associated with analyst forecasts, while the concentration of shareholdings by insiders reduces the moral hazard problem associated with ...
Working Paper
Jump risk, time-varying risk premia, and technical trading profits
In this paper we investigate the recently documented trading profits based on technical trading rules in an asset pricing framework that incorporates jump risk and time-varying risk premia. Following Brock, Lakonishok, and LeBaron (1992), we apply popular technical trading rules to the daily S&P 500 index over a long period of time. Trading profits are examined using bootstrap simulation to address distributional anomalies. We estimate a variety of asset pricing models, including the random walk, autoregressive models, a combined jump diffusion model, and a combined model of jump-diffusion ...
Working Paper
Expected stock returns and volatility in a production economy: a theory and some evidence
The sign of the relationship between expected stock market returns and volatility appears to vary over time, a result that seems at odds with basic notions of risk and return. In this paper we construct an economy where production involves the use of both labor and capital as inputs. We show that when capital investment is "sticky," the sign of the relation between stock market risk and return varies in accordance with the supply of labor but requires no time variation in preferences. In particular, we show that for asset market equilibria where firms face an elastic supply of labor, the ...
Working Paper
Emerging debt and equity markets: an exploratory investigation of integration using daily data
In this paper we examine integration between emerging and U.S. debt and equity markets. We first investigate price changes around significant "events," in this case changes in short-term U.S. interest rates brought about by actions of the Federal Reserve. Second, we estimate the predictability of returns using both domestic and U.S. variables. Finally, we test whether a single latent variable can explain these returns. The evidence suggests that the degree of integration varies with security types and the country of origin. However, these differences between security types become less ...
Journal Article
Analyzing risk and return for mortgage-backed securities
Journal Article
Policy essay--new tools for regulators in a high-tech world
Journal Article
The buck stops where? The role of limited liability in economics
Over the last few centuries laws have increasingly protected individuals and corporations from liability resulting from bad economic outcomes. This evolution in liability provisions, by many accounts, has significantly influenced both the level and distribution of contemporary economic output as well as the allocation of financial resources in today's financial markets. ; Through a review of an extensive and growing literature, the authors of this article consider how limited liability affects investment, labor, and financing decisions made by individuals and corporations as well as ...
Journal Article
What do asset prices tell us about the future?
It is fairly obvious that in market-based economies prices act as a constraint on individual behavior, providing a means by which goods and services flow to those most willing and able to pay for them. But prices play an additional role in the economy-that of signaling the present and expected future state of affairs. Having accurate forecast information is particularly important to policymakers, who are concerned with acting in advance to avoid bad economic outcomes rather than simply reacting to events. ; This article reviews the theoretical literature regarding the extent to which asset ...
Working Paper
Decentralized production and public liquidity with private information
Firms with private information about the outcomes of production under uncertainty may face capital (liquidity) constraints that prevent them from attaining efficient levels of investment in a world with costly and/or imperfect monitoring. As an alternative, we examine the efficiency of a simple pooling scheme designed to provide a public (cooperative) supply of liquidity that results in the first best outcome for economic growth. We show that if, absent aggregate uncertainty, the elasticity of scale of the production technology is sufficiently small, then efficient levels of investment and ...