This article examines the performance of 85 UK unit trusts with North American investment objectives between January 1985 and December 1996 using unconditional and conditional performance measures. The paper finds that, on average, the trusts register insignificant performance to each of the respective benchmark portfolios. In addition there is no evidence of any predictability in performance. ...

This paper investigates the effect of different risk attitudes on the financial decisions of two insiders trading in the stock market. We consider a static version of the Kyle (1985) model with two insiders. Insider 1 is risk neutral while insider 2 is risk averse with negative exponential utility. First, we prove the existence of a unique linear equilibrium. Second, we obtain somewhat surprisi...

Using 5-year credit default swap (CDS) contracts on 1,247 U.S. firms from 2003 2011, we show a 3-month formation and 1-month holding period CDS momentum strategy yields 52 bps per month. By incorporating past CDS return signals, we further show traditional stock momentum strategies avoid abrupt losses during the crisis period and improve their performance by net 104 bps per month. Both within C...

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is adjusted to allow rational informational herding and contrarianism. While herding and contrarianism did no...

Food commodity price fluctuations have an important impact on poverty and food insecurity across the world. Conventional models have not provided a complete picture of recent price spikes in agricultural commodity markets, while there is an urgent need for appropriate policy responses. Perhaps new approaches are needed in order to better understand international spill-overs, the feedback betwee...

This paper offers an explanation for stock market crashes which focuses on the role of rational but uninformed traders. We show that uninformed traders can precipitate a price crash because as prices decline, they surmise that informed traders received negative information, which leads them to reduce their demand for assets and drive the price of stocks even lower. The model yields several impl...

Recently, stock exchanges have altered their trading fees to subsidize liquidity by offering “make” rebates for providing liquidity through limit orders and charging “take” fees for consuming liquidity via marketable orders, leading to debate regarding the impact of these fees on market quality. Using an exogenous experiment performed by NASDAQ in 2015, I employ difference-in-differences analys...

Using monthly data on temporary trade barriers (TTBs), we estimate the dynamic employment effects of protectionism through vertical production linkages. First, exploiting high-frequency and TTB procedural details, identify policy shocks exogenous to economic fundamentals. We then use input-output tables construct measures affecting downstream producers. Finally, panel local projections using id...

This paper develops a sequential random matching model of asset trading to analyze how the extent of information about an asset that is available in the market can affect its tradeability. Liquidity traders are rational agents with higher impatience, which make optimal intertemporal consumption decisions given the trading constraints. Information asymmetries result in unexecuted trades. Agents ...