We formalize the idea that the financial sector can be a source of non-fundamental risk. Households' desire to hedge against price volatility can generate price volatility in equilibrium, even absent fundamental risk. Fearing that asset prices may fall, risk-averse households demand safe assets...

Motivated by the observation that survey expectations of stock returns are inconsistent with rational return expectations under real-world probabilities, we investigate whether alternative expectations hypotheses entertained in the literature on asset pricing are consistent with the survey...

We study the formation of price bubbles on experimental asset markets where cash earns interest. There are two main conclusions. The first is that paying positive interest on cash is ineffective in diminishing bubbles through the reducing-active-participation channel. The second is that the...

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...

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...

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...

We decompose the variance risk premium into upside and downside variance risk premia. These components reflect market compensation for changes in good and bad uncertainties. Their difference is a measure of the skewness risk premium (SRP), which captures asymmetric views on favorable versus...

Under very general conditions, the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process can be decomposed into diffusive volatility and squared jump variation. We use this result to develop a new option valuation model in which the underlying asset price exhibits volatility and jump intensity...

Does extreme downside risk require a risk premium in the pricing of individual assets? Extreme downside risk is a conditional measure for the co-movement of individual stocks with the market, given that the state of the world is extremely bad. This measure, derived from statistical extreme value...

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a "path" factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data. The uncertainty is highest when it...