The paper analyzes the interactions between the precision of information, trade and welfare within a decision framework of an exporting firm. Information in a financial market is described in terms of a publicly observable signal. With higher transparency, the signal conveys more precise information about the random foreign exchange rate. More precise information about exchange rate changes has...

We review the literature on return and cash flow growth predictability form the perspective of the present-value identity. We focus predominantly on recent work. Our emphasis is on U.S. aggregate stock return predictability, but we also discuss evidence from other asset classes and countries. JEL classification: G10, G12, G14, G35.

It is shown that the absence of call spread, butterfly spread and calendar spread arbitrages is sufficient to exclude all static arbitrages from a set of option price quotes across strikes and maturities on a single underlier.  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G10; G12; G13; G14

We use a stock-market game and predictions of examination marks to examine differences between overconfidence and biased self-attribution (BSA) of British and Asian students. Although different overconfidence measures show little correlation, Asians are consistently more overconfident than the British. All are equally prone to BSA. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G...

In a marketplace of repeated transactions with asymmetric information, theory predicts that sellers with a good reputation have a higher probability of sale and receive a higher transaction price. In this paper, I test this theory using more than 55,000 auctions of “Gmail invitations” on eBay, essentially a market of homogeneous goods with non-enforceable contracts. This is an ideal environment...

This paper studies the cross-sectional risk-return trade-off in the stock market. A fundamental principle in finance is the positive relation between risk and expected return, whereas recent empirical evidence suggests the opposite. We apply referencedependent preferences to shed light on this violation. Reference-dependent preferences (e.g., prospect theory) typically posit that when facing pr...

Existing studies find that size, book-to-market, momentum and liquidity explain the crosssection of average returns, but debate continues over whether these variables are risk factors. We propose a new test of whether a candidate variable is a priced risk factor. Specifically, we test whether there is a relationship between the conditional mean and conditional variance of the return on the cand...

This study explores the role of investor sentiment in the pricing of a broad set of macro-related risk factors. Economic theory suggests that pervasive factors (such as TFP and consumption growth) should be priced in the cross-section of stock returns. However, when we form portfolios based directly on their exposure to macro factors, we find that portfolios with higher risk exposure do not ear...

This paper develops a simple new methodology to test for asset integration and applies it within and between American stock markets. Our technique is tightly based on a general intertemporal asset-pricing model, and relies on estimating and comparing expected risk-free rates across assets. Expected risk-free rates are allowed to vary freely over time, constrained only by the fact that they are ...

Abstract Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage, such as options and leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors’ constraints, and, therefore, we hypothesize that lowers required returns. Consistent this hypothesis, find empirically ETFs provide significant amounts of leverage; increases return volatility in proportion to the higher is ...