Using high-frequency stock market data and (synthetic) variance swap rates, this paper identifies and investigates the temporal variation in the market variance risk premium. The variance risk is manifest in two salient features of financial returns: stochastic volatility and jumps. The pricing of these two separate components is analyzed in a general semiparametric framework. The key empirical...

The securities market is the fundamental theo­ retical framework in economics and finance for resource allocation under uncertainty. Securi­ ties serve both to reallocate risk and to dissem­ inate probabilistic information. Complete securi­ ties markets-which contain one security for ev­ ery possible state of nature-support Pareto op­ timal allocations of risk. Complete markets suf­ fer from th...

Theories suggesting either static or dynamic productivity gains derived from exports often assume the prior existence of a perfect market. In the presence of market failure, however, the competition effect and the resource reallocation effect of exports on productive efficiency may be greatly reduced; and there may actually be disincentives for innovation. This paper analyses the impact of expo...

In Dutch healthcare, new market mechanisms have been introduced on an experimental basis in an attempt to contain costs and improve quality. Informed by a constructivist approach, we demonstrate that such experiments are not neutral testing grounds. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and policy texts, we reconstruct an experiment on free pricing in dental care that turned into a critical e...

This paper examines the role of the federal government in the market for terrorism reinsurance. We investigate the stock price response of affected industries to a sequence of 13 events culminating in the enactment of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002. In the industries most likely to be affected by TRIA—banking, construction, insurance, real estate investment trusts, transportati...

The industrial organization approach to banking is extended to analyze the effects of interbank market activity and regulatory liquidity requirements on bank behavior. A multi-stage decision situation allows for considering the interaction between credit risk and liquidity risk of banks. This interaction is found to make a risk neutral bank behave as if it were risk averse in an environment whe...

Risk preferences are generally measured with utility functions, which are subjective and usually restrict market agents to be risk averse. The current study investigates investors' preferences toward risk from the index price movement perspective. In a risk neutral market, future prices will increase or decrease with the same probability. However, if the market representative-agents are risk av...

This paper examines whether the different types of block shareholdings will have a different impact on the extent of Web voluntary disclosure during the differential privatization stages. Prior literature suggests that block ownership may have a substitutive or complementary monitoring effect on corporate disclosure. However, for economies transferring from state endowment to being privately he...

Insider trading studies related to the German market have emphasized that outside investors may earn excess returns by mimicking the transactions of corporate directors. Such a result, provided that it holds, would constitute a serious violation of the efficient market hypothesis. The results presented in this paper, though, show that this anomaly is mainly caused by a subset of stocks with hig...

We use recent farm household survey data from 5 Central European countries to explore the extent to which ill-functioning land and credit markets may present an obstacle to rural development. The first finding is that improved access to credit can, indeed, make a contribution to a more dynamic rural sector. A considerable share of rural households express their desire to expand agricultural cul...