This paper highlights two new effects of credit default swap markets (CDS) in a general equilibrium setting. First, when firms' cash flows are correlated, CDSs impact the cost of capital{credit spreads{and investment for all firms, even those that are not CDS reference entities. Second, when...

This paper shows that credit default swaps (CDS) can affect the type of debt firms issue. Firms face a trade-off between investment scale and the cost of capital measured by the credit spread. Small-scale investment is safe, fully collateralized, but earns modest profits in all states....

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage boom and then to the bust of 2007-2009. We study the effect of leverage, tranching, securitization and CDS on asset prices in a general equilibrium model with collateral. We show why tranching and leverage tend...

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...

This paper aims at testing for time-variations in herd behavior in stock markets. In particular, we analyze how investors’ behavior differs between times of market turmoil and tranquil trading periods. Thereby, we take into account herding within a certain market as well as international...

Short sellers are routinely blamed for destabilizing stock markets by exacerbating deviations from fundamental values. In response, regulators periodically impose short sale constraints aimed at preventing excessive stock market declines. One explanation is that policy makers regard short...

This paper explores commonality in liquidity for country ETFs. Using data from 21 country ETFs, the empirical results present the strong commonality in liquidity among country ETFs. Furthermore, the paper shows that the magnitude of commonality in liquidity for country ETFs varies with the...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

We study the price pressure and price discovery effects in the U.S. Treasury market by using a term structure model. Our model decomposes yield curve shifts into two components: a virtually permanent change related to order flow and a transitory, price pressure effect due to dealer inventories....

We investigate the factor structure of the term structure of interest rates and argue that characterizing the minimal dimension of the data-generating process is more challenging than currently appreciated. To circumvent these difficulties, we introduce a novel nonparametric bootstrap that is...