This paper identifies cash-flow news and expected-return news in financial statements and shows that stock returns are increasing with positive cash-flow news in the statements and decreasing in the news about increasing expected returns. The identified news measures differ significantly from those identified from decomposing returns based on the Vuoltennaho (2002) framework.
We propose an extension of standard asymmetric volatility models in the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) class that admits conditional non-Gaussianities in a tractable fashion. Our "bad environment-good environment" (BEGE) model utilizes two gamma-distributed shocks and generates a conditional shock distribution with time-varying heteroskedasticity, skewness, and kurtosis. The BEGE model features nontrivial news impact curves and closed-form solutions for higher-order moments.
We model an electronic limit order book as a multi-class queueing system under fluid dynamics, and formulate and solve a problem of limit and market order placement to optimally buy a block of shares over a short, predetermined time horizon. Using the structure of the optimal execution policy, we identify microstructure variables that affect trading costs over short time horizons and propose a resulting microstructure-based model of market impact costs.
We study the information flows that arise among a set of agents with local knowledge and directed payoff interactions, which differ among pairs of agents. First, we study the equilibrium of a game where, before making decisions, agents can invest in pairwise active communication (speaking) and pairwise passive communication (listening). This leads to a full characterization of information and influence flows.
Contingent capital (CC), which intends to internalize the costs of too-big-to-fail in the capital structure of large banks, has been under intense debate by policy makers and academics. We show that CC with a market trigger, in which direct stake-holders are unable to choose optimal conversion policies, does not lead to a unique competitive equilibrium, unless value transfer at conversion is not expected ex-ante. The "no value transfer" restriction precludes penalizing bank managers for taking excessive risk.
This study takes advantage of a unique episode in which the SEC distributed securities filings to a small group of investors ahead of their public releases. The random delay time provides a rare natural experiment for examining how markets process new private information. It takes minutes — not seconds — for informed traders to incorporate fundamental information into stock prices. The early-informed convey more information into stock prices when the delay before public release is longer.
We estimate a New-Keynesian macro model accommodating regime-switching behavior in monetary policy and in macro shocks. Key to our estimation strategy is the use of survey-based expectations for inflation and output. We identify accommodating monetary policy before 1980, with activist monetary policy prevailing most but not 100% of the time thereafter. Systematic monetary policy switched to the activist regime in the 2000-2005 period through an aggressive lowering of interest rates.
We consider a broad class of dynamic portfolio optimization problems that allow for complex models of return predictability, transaction costs, trading constraints, and risk considerations. Determining an optimal policy in this general setting is almost always intractable. We propose a class of linear rebalancing rules and describe an efficient computational procedure to optimize with this class. We illustrate this method in the context of portfolio execution and show that it achieves near optimal performance.
Shortfall aversion reflects the higher utility loss of a spending cut from a reference point than the utility gain from a similar spending increase, in the spirit of Prospect Theory's loss aversion. This paper posits a model of utility of spending scaled by a function of past peak spending, called target spending. The discontinuity of the marginal utility at the target spending corresponds to shortfall aversion.