We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades. In contrast to theories of STT imposition as a means to reduce...

We examine overconfidence among equity mutual fund managers. While overconfidence has been extensively documented among retail investors, evidence from professional investors is scarce. Consistent with theories of overconfidence, we find that fund managers trade more after good past performance....

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

This paper investigates high-frequency (HF) market and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury market around major macroeconomic news announcements. BrokerTec introduced i-Cross at the end of 2007 and we use this exogenous event as an instrument to analyze the impact of HF activities on liquidity and...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a twostep...

We examine overconfidence among equity mutual fund managers. While overconfidence has been extensively documented among retail investors, evidence from professional investors is scarce. Consistent with theories of overconfidence, we find that fund managers trade more after good past performance....

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities—notably, central banks—focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of...