Search Results
Working Paper
When do low-frequency measures really measure transaction costs?
We compare popular measures of transaction costs based on daily data with their high-frequency data-based counterparts. We find that for U.S. equities and major foreign exchange rates, (i) the measures based on daily data are highly upward biased and imprecise; (ii) the bias is a function of volatility; and (iii) it is primarily volatility that drives the dynamics of these liquidity proxies both in the cross section as well as over time. We corroborate our results in carefully designed simulations and show that such distortions arise when the true transaction costs are small relative to ...
Working Paper
Contracting with Feedback
We study the effect of financial market conditions on managerial compensation structure. First, we analyze the optimal pay-for-performance in a model in which corporate decisions and firm value are both endogenous to trading due to feedback from information contained in stock prices. In a less frictional financial market, the improved information content of stock prices helps guide managerial decisions, and this information substitutes out part of the direct incentive provision from compensation contracts. Thus, the optimal pay-for-performance is lowered in response to reductions in market ...
Working Paper
Portfolio choice with house value misperception
Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on average, in a 4.56 percent decrease in the share of risky stock holdings for those households that participate in the stock market. We then build a rational inattention model in which households make decisions based on their perceived level of housing wealth. Numerical simulations generate the effects of ...
Working Paper
Measuring Transaction Costs in the Absence of Timestamps
This paper develops measures of transaction costs in the absence of transaction timestamps and information about who initiates transactions, which are data limitations that often arise in studies of over-the-counter markets. I propose new measures of the effective spread and study the performance of all estimators analytically, in simulations, and present an empirical illustration with small-cap stocks for the 2005-2014 period. My theoretical, simulation, and empirical results provide new insights into measuring transaction costs and may help guide future empirical work.
Working Paper
Transaction costs and consumption
The Rational Expectations Permanent Income Hypothesis (RE-PIH) fails to explain several features of consumption behavior documented by previous researchers. First, the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of unanticipated income shocks tends to decrease as the size of the shocks becomes larger. Second, the MPC out of small income shocks is well above what the RE-PIH predicts. Third, consumption responds to small anticipated income changes, but not to large ones. This paper argues that these findings can be reconciled within a RE-PIH framework that includes a cash-in-advance constraint. In ...