Trillions of dollars are invested through index funds, exchange-traded funds, and other index derivatives. The benefits of index-linked investing are well-known, but the possible broader economic consequences are unstudied. I review research which suggests that index-linked investing is...

Investors rebalance their portfolios as their views about expected returns and risk change. We use empirical measures of portfolio rebalancing to back out investors' views, specifically their views about the state of the economy. We show that aggregate portfolio rebalancing across equity sectors...

We study the interplay of share prices and firm decisions when share prices aggregate and convey noisy information about fundamentals to investors and managers. First, we show that the informational feedback between the firm's share price and its investment decisions leads to a systematic...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

New theories have emerged over the past 10 years that reveal CEFs to be an important and efficient organizational device. This review surveys the old and current literature on closed-end funds (CEFs) in general and theories of discounts in particular. Among the topics reviewed are liquidity...

Single period risks acceptable to the market at zero cost are modeled by a convex set of random variables leading to bid and ask prices that are trade size dependent. The theory of nonlinear expectations is employed to construct dynamically consistent sequences of bid and ask unit size prices...

We show how to price the time series and cross section of the term structure of interest rates using a three-step linear regression approach. Our method allows computationally fast estimation of term structure models with a large number of pricing factors. We present specification tests favoring...

Order imbalance methodology is utilized to examine the link between trading activity and returns in the six most liquid international bond futures markets. Order imbalances are strongly related to contemporaneous returns, in the expected direction (i.e. excess buy (sell) orders push down (up)...

This paper aims at testing for time-variations in herd behavior in stock markets. In particular, we analyze how investors’ behavior differs between times of market turmoil and tranquil trading periods. Thereby, we take into account herding within a certain market as well as international...

We investigate the oil price risk exposure of the U.S. Travel and Leisure industry. In this paper, we utilize the Fama–French–Carhart's (1997) four-factor asset pricing model augmented with oil price risk factor. The results of our study suggest that oil price sensitivities vary...