Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

This paper investigates whether the empirical linkages between stock returns and trading volume differ over the fluctuations of stock markets, i.e., whether the return–volume relation is asymmetric in bull and bear stock markets. Using monthly data for the S&P 500 price index and trading...

Minimal discounted distorted expectations across a range of stress levels are employed to model risk acceptability in markets. Interactions between discounting and stress levels used in measure changes are accommodated by lowering discount rates for the higher stress levels. Acceptability...

It is high time we rediscovered the role of the financial cycle in macroeconomics. In the environment that has prevailed for at least three decades now, it is not possible to understand business fluctuations and the corresponding analytical and policy challenges without understanding the...

A broad stream of research shows that information flows into underlying stock prices through the options market. For instance, prior research shows that both the Put–Call Ratio (P/C) and the Option-to-Stock Volume Ratio (O/S) predict negative future stock returns. In this paper, we compare the...

Besides the heterogeneity of agents’ beliefs, we perceive that, contrary to the constant short-term risk attitude of fundamentalists, the risk attitude for chartists varies over time due to psychological factors such as prospect theory’s reflection effect, which refers to the reversing of...

In a dynamic model of financial market trading multiple heterogeneously informed traders choose when to place orders. Better informed traders trade immediately, worse informed delay – even though they expect the market to move against them. This behavior generates intraday patterns with...

In this paper, we investigate whether Japanese candlesticks can help traders to find the best trade-off between market timing and market impact costs. Based on fixed-effect panel regressions on a sample of 81 European stocks, we show that implicit transaction costs are better characterized by...

We show that firm headquarters’ geographic proximity to political power centers (state capitals) is associated with higher abnormal returns. Consistent with the notion that this effect is rooted in social network links, we find it is more pronounced in communities with high levels of...

We study the dynamic impact of idiosyncratic volatility and bond liquidity on corporate bond spreads over time and empirically disentangle both effects. Using an extensive data set, we find that both idiosyncratic volatility and liquidity are critical mainly for the distress portfolios, i.e.,...