This paper investigates the warrant pricing abilities of dilution-adjusted versions of the Black-Scholes and Jump-Diffusion option pricing models. Because of the typically long lives of warrants, their pricing is hypothesized to benefit from use of the Jump-Diffusion model, which relaxes the Black-Scholes restriction against stock price jumps. Empirical results indicate that while the Black-Scholes model almost uniformly provides more efficient estimates, the Jump-Diffusion model generally provides less biased estimates of market value. Particularly for the valuation of out-of-the-money warrants and warrants on stocks with a history of large and/or frequent jumps, the Jump-Diffusion model may be preferred.

When futures contracts are settled with respect to underlying asset prices, received theory suggests that the differences between futures prices and implied forward prices (from the term structure) are strictly due to marking to market, ceteris paribus. Empirical evidence appears to indicate that such differences are small for contracts with short maturities. What happens when the futures contract settles to yields implied by future prices of underlying assets? The Eurodollar futures contract, which is the most actively traded futures contract in the United States, settles to yield as opposed to prices. This unique settlement feature is shown to imply that the implied forward prices from the LIBOR term structure should differ from the futures prices even in the absence of marking to market. Differences due to marking to market effect are small: they are shown to vary between 2 to 45 basis points (less than one-half percent of futures prices). On the other hand, differences between implied forward prices and futures prices are shown to be relatively large.

This article examines the benefits of corporate bond diversification for U.S. investors. Analysis of a newly compiled bond-level data set for 2000–2010 finds that diversification with corporate bonds can significantly reduce volatility and increase risk-adjusted returns for U.S. investors. Unlike diversification with equities, corporate bonds offer significant out-of-sample risk reduction, particularly during the recent financial crisis. Risk-reduction gains are large even when the benchmark includes international equities or when longer samples of equities and sovereign bonds are used to inform corporate bond returns. Finally, significant risk-reduction gains remain after accounting for bond characteristics, liquidity, and informational costs.

Using unique transactions data for individual high-frequency trading (HFT) firms in the U.K. equity market, we examine the extent to which the trading activity of individual HFT firms is correlated with each other and the impact on price efficiency. We find that HFT order flow, net positions, and total volume exhibit significantly higher commonality than those of a comparison group of investment banks. However, intraday HFT order flow commonality is associated with a permanent price impact, suggesting that commonality in HFT activity is information based and so does not generally contribute to undue price pressure and price dislocations.

We analyze a new class of linear factor models in which the factors are latent and the covariance matrix of excess returns follows a multivariate stochastic volatility process. We evaluate cross-sectional restrictions suggested by the arbitrage pricing theory (APT), compare competing stochastic volatility specifications for the covariance matrix, and test for the number of factors. We also examine whether return predictability can be attributed to time-varying factor risk premia. Analysis of these models is feasible due to recent advances in Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We find that three latent factors with multivariate stochastic volatility best explain excess returns for a sample of 10 size decile portfolios. The data strongly favor models constrained by APT pricing restrictions over otherwise identical unconstrained models.

We present CoMargin, a new methodology to estimate collateral requirements in derivatives central counterparties (CCPs). CoMargin depends on both the tail risk of a given market participant and its interdependence with other participants. Our approach internalizes trading externalities and enhances the stability of CCPs, thus reducing systemic risk concerns. We assess our methodology using proprietary data from the Canadian Derivatives Clearing Corporation that include daily observations of the actual trading positions of all of its members from 2003 to 2011. We show that CoMargin outperforms existing margining systems by stabilizing the probability and minimizing the shortfall of simultaneous margin-exceeding losses.

This article examines the pricing of a firm’s carbon risk in the corporate bond market. Contrary to the “carbon risk premium” hypothesis, bonds of more carbon-intensive firms earn significantly lower returns. This effect cannot be explained by a comprehensive list of bond characteristics and exposure to known risk factors. Investigating sources of the low carbon alpha, we find the underperformance of bonds issued by carbon-intensive firms cannot be fully explained by divestment from institutional investors. Instead, our evidence is most consistent with investor underreaction to the predictability of carbon intensity for firm cash-flow news, creditworthiness, and environmental incidents.

The bear market of the late sixties amidst inflation has led to growing concern over the validity of the proposition that stocks provide a good hedge against inflation. Conflicting arguments have been raised on both sides of the issue but a synthesis has as yet failed to emerge. The gains resulting from a careful assessment of the various propositions are obvious. If stock prices are adversely affected by inflation, the financial analyst must search for other hedges against the erosion of the purchasing power of money, while the economist must note that inflation has a depressing effect on economic growth through the rise of the cost of capital.

In this paper, the Markowitz and Sharpe portfolio selection approaches are viewed as alternative analytic processes for portfolio selection. By “analytic process,” we mean a process that begins with data collection and culminates when a decision is made. The properties of these analytic processes are examined in the same sense that one studies the properties of a statistical estimator, except that a global view of the analytic process is taken. The properties of decisions that result from applications of these processes are studied experimentally, and are reported in terms of the objectives of the portfolio manager.

The purpose of this research is to develop a model for determining the credit worthiness of commercial loan applicants in a particular troubled industrial sector of France. The model is developed with the assistance of Banque de France, which serves tne central banking function in a banking environment that has become increasingly competitive in recent years. The research assesses the combined potential of traditional financial statement analysis with several relatively modern statistical procedures to aid the commercial loan officer.

The large amount of foreign direct investment by U. S. firms in recent years suggests that such firms had a high internal rate of return on investment abroad. In this paper we attempt to explain this high rate of return. We conclude that direct investors tend to be in research-intensive industries and that their profitability is associated with research and development, rather than with direct investment itself. By investing abroad, or exporting, they increase the expected return to research activity. Thus, the internal rate of return on foreign direct investment exceeds average rates of return observed in foreign economies. Since direct investors in manufacturing are typically research-intensive, this result suggests why capital may flow from countries with high rates of return to those with lower observed rates of return.

This paper examines the style-based feedback trading behavior of U.S. mutual fund managers. We provide an empirical version of Barberis and Shleifer’s style-switching model. We find style-based feedback trading for 77% of the funds, half of which is positive (negative) feedback trading. There is evidence for “twin style” switching, where capital is channeled between value and growth, and between large- and small-cap. Growth (value) funds apply more positive (negative) feedback trading. Funds that switch more aggressively are younger and have higher expense ratios. Finally, we find that positive (negative) feedback trading yields positive (negative) alpha.

We first develop a theory-based metric to judge the popularity of value weighting in a stock market. We then use our metric to document that although value weighting is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is increasing almost everywhere. Finally, as we have better data for the United States, we explore why value weighting is becoming more popular in the United States.

In this article, I study the predictability of bond risk premia by means of expectations to future business conditions using survey forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. I show that expected business conditions consistently affect excess bond returns and that the inclusion of expected business conditions in standard predictive regressions improve forecast performance relative to models using information derived from the current term structure or macroeconomic variables. The results are confirmed in a real-time out-of-sample exercise, where the predictive accuracy of the models is evaluated both statistically and from the perspective of a mean-variance investor that trades in the bond market.

The 39 experiments reported here examine the impact on trading profits and on market performance of awarding special trading privileges to some traders and not others. In call market experiments, the last-mover and orderflow access privileges are both modestly profitable and neither impairs market performance. In continuous market experiments, quicker access to orderflow information is quite profitable and more detailed access is possibly profitable; both privileges seem to enhance market performance slightly. By contrast, privileged marketmaking is extremely profitable and greatly impairs market performance.

There have been many efforts in recent years to explain differences in the performance of commercial banks. Interest has centered on the extent to which changes in a selected group of indices of bank performance are related to the structure of banking markets and selected other factors thought to influence bank behavior. While various techniques have been used, the most common has been multiple linear regression. The measures of performance entered into the regression equations have included the price and quantity of bank services and bank profitability, while the explanatory variables have included, to name only a few, the one-, two-, or three-bank concentration ratio, the number of banks in the market, the existence of competition from nonbank financial institutions, bank costs, bank size, and proxies for the demand for banking services. Generalizations then have been made about the impact of market structure and other variables on bank performance, generalizations based upon the regression coefficients of the explanatory variables. The consensus appears to be that the demand for banking services and bank costs are significant determinants of the performance of individual commercial banks; market structure appears to be much less important. However, the conclusions are by no means unanimous.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate mathematically that the skewness of securities' returns--the ratio of the third moment to the standard deviation cubed--is sensitive to the length of the differencing interval over which returns are measured. Empirical observations of this so-called intervaling effect on skewness have been reported in at least three articles in this Journal. There have been no attempts, however, to examine this effect analytically. The empirical evidence presented in the literature is often contradictory and remains unexplained because of a lack of an analytical insight into the causes of the intervaling effect.

In this reply, we point out that Chang and Shankar's measure of hedging performance, which they label HE1, is not an adequate measure. We describe an alternative measure, labeled HBS, which has a number of desirable ex ante and ex post statistical properties.

Several people have attempted to evaluate the performance of mutual funds. Treynor [17] and Sharpe [15] have developed performance measures which make it possible to establish relative rankings for such funds. Treynor and Mazuy [18] have devised a statistical test for determining whether mutual funds successfully anticipate major fluctuations in the stock market. Jensen [7] has provided an absolute measure of performance which can be used to determine whether mutual funds earn higher or lower returns than those expected for the level of risk associated with their portfolios. McDonald [11] has employed the measures of performance developed by Sharpe, Treynor, and Jensen to evaluate the objectives, risk, and return of mutual funds in the period 1960–1969. Although these studies have examined mutual fund performance, none has employed an analytical framework for dealing explicitly with the nonstationarity which is likely to exist in the risk-return relationships for such funds [13].

Using a novel database on venue short sales and market design characteristics, we ask: Where do short sellers exploit their information advantage? Consistent with the prediction of Zhu (2014), we find that exchange short sales comprise a larger proportion of trading and are more informative about future prices than dark-pool short sales, particularly when there is greater competition among short sellers to trade and in the presence of short-lived information. When examining market design characteristics, we find that dark pools offering volume-weighted average price crossing attract more short sales, whereas those offering block trading attract fewer short sales.