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...

The paper extends the evidence on the factors relevant for pricing stocks in emerging markets. While previous literature focused on Latin American and Asian developing markets, Central and Eastern European markets remain under-researched. By focusing on the Polish stock market, we aim to fill in...

There is much literature that deals with modeling and forecasting asset return volatility. However, much of this research does not attempt to explain variations in the level of volatility. Movements in volatility are often linked to trading volume or frequency, as a reflection of underlying...

The aim of this paper is to study the pricing factor structure of Italian equity returns. Using twenty five years of data, we focus on the role of other risk factors besides the market beta, namely size, book to market, and momentum. A two step empirical analysis is provided where first we...

This dissertation is built around three separate papers that research several aspects of stock market liquidity. All three papers use the innovative XLM (Exchange Liquidity Measure) data to measure the liquidity. The first paper entitled Does Screen Trading Weather the Weather? A Note on Cloudy...

This paper investigates a equilibrium theory of capital asset pricing with the spirit of capitalism. It is an attempt to put together ideas from the modern finance literature and the literature on stochastic growth models. Using methods adopted in Brock (1982), an equivalent characterization of...

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

In existing theory, wealth is no more valuable than its implied consumption rewards. In reality investors acquire wealth not just for its implied consumption, but for the resulting social status. Max M. Weber refers to this desire for wealth as the spirit of capitalism. We examine, both...

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...

Estimates of the real term structure for the euro area implied by French index-linked bonds are obtained by means of a smoothing spline methodology. The real term structure allows computation of the constant-maturity inflation compensation, which is compared with the surveyed inflation...