This paper investigates the motive of option trading. We show that option trading is mostly driven by differences of opinion, a finding different from the current literature that attempts to attribute option trading to information asymmetry. Our conclusion is based on three pieces of empirical...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...

In a market with short term agents and heterogeneous information, when liquidity trading displays persistence, prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors exploit a private learning channel to infer the demand of liquidity traders from the...

We describe a new mechanism that explains the transmission of liquidity shocks from one security to another ("liquidity spillovers"). Dealers use prices of other securities as a source of information. As prices of less liquid securities convey less precise information, a drop in liquidity for...

We propose a new threshold–pre-averaging realized estimator for the integrated co-volatility of two assets using non-synchronous observations with the simultaneous presence of microstructure noise and jumps. We derive a noise-robust Hayashi–Yoshida estimator that allows for very general...

We document the ability of the credit default swap (CDS) market to anticipate favorable as well as unfavorable credit rating change (RC) announcements based on more extensive samples of credit rating events and CDS spreads than previous studies. We obtain four new results. In contrast to prior...

Using eight measures of liquidity, and addressing the potential endogeneity of initial returns, we find underpricing generally increases the secondary market liquidity of IPOs over the first year of trading, irrespective of the horizon over which liquidity is measured. For two model...

Using a large proprietary database of institutional trades, we investigate whether institutional investors drive the turn-of-the-year (TOY) effect. Institutions that engage in window dressing, tax-loss selling, or risk shifting will contribute to the TOY effect by selling small, poorly...