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...

The study analyses the nature and behaviour of volatility, the risk-return relationship and the long-term trend of volatility on the South African equity markets, using aggregate-level, industrial-level and sectoral-level daily data for the period 1995-2009. By employing dummy variables for the...

This article shows that a sizable component of emerging market sovereign yield spreads is due to factors other than default risk, such as liquidity. The author estimates the non-default component of the yield spreads as the basis between the actual credit default swap (CDS) premium and the...

I study the consumption responses of heterogeneous households following changes in both house prices and interest rates. I show the common assumption that household period utility is separable in housing and consumption can be consistent with the observed co-movement between these two series...

During the last decades many financial analysts, either theorists or practitioners, have dedicated their studies to the interactions between different financial sectors. The results of these researches confirm that commodities, bonds and stock markets are closely related, therefore a thorough...

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...

We study the interplay of share prices and firm decisions when share prices aggregate and convey noisy information about fundamentals to investors and managers. First, we show that the informational feedback between the firm's share price and its investment decisions leads to a systematic...

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...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...