This paper examines how well alternate time-changed Lévy processes capture stochastic volatility and the substantial outliers observed in U.S. stock market returns over the past 85 years. The autocorrelation of daily stock market returns varies substantially over time, necessitating an additional state variable when analyzing historical data. I estimate various one- and two-factor stochastic volatility/Lévy models with time-varying autocorrelation via extensions of the Bates (2006) methodology that provide filtered daily estimates of volatility and autocorrelation. The paper explores option pricing implications, including for the Volatility Index (VIX) during the recent financial crisis.

[This article investigates the predictability of jump arrivals in U.S. stock markets. Using a new test that identifies jump predictors up to the intraday level, I find that jumps are likely to occur shortly after macroeconomic information releases, such as the Federal Reserve announcements, nonfarm payroll reports, and jobless claims, as well as market index jumps. I also find firm-specific jump predictors related to earnings releases, analyst recommendations, past stock jumps, and dividend dates. Evidence suggests that distinguishing systematic jumps from idiosyncratic jumps is possible using the characteristics of jump predictors. Finally, I present a short-term jump size clustering.]

Abstract During 2004 and 2005, long-horizon interest rates fell sharply in major international government bond markets (Greenspan's “conundrum”). This common fall mainly reflected lower long real rates. To investigate possible causes, the authors apply a no-arbitrage affine modeling framework to understanding the UK real term structure. The authors find that time-varying term premia are important in explaining movements in long real forward rates. And, although there is evidence that long-horizon expected short real rates declined over the conundrum period, the authors’ results suggest that lower term premia played the dominant role. This could be consistent with the so-called “search for yield” and excess liquidity explanations for the conundrum.

The paper demonstrates that a real options structural model of borrower-creditor debt re-negotiations can help explain the cross-sectional variability of losses on defaulted debt securities. The explanatory power of this approach can be improved even further via a system of equations that incorporates additional information by jointly estimating the market values of debt and equity. Empirical tests with a large number of corporate defaults confirm the usefulness of this method. Moreover, higher volatility and lower discount rates around business cycle turning points can result in stakeholders waiting relatively longer for additional returns from defaulted debt. Such optimal stopping behavior based on a real options model mitigates the reduction in face value of debt but can prolong the duration of financial distress.

This paper examines the evolution of corporate boards following a large performance decline. Over 40% of the original directors depart the board during the three years following underperformance. Measures of initial CEO influence over the board such as CEO ownership are associated with smaller increases in board independence and less board turnover. The underperforming firms undergo a strong recovery subsequently, with the largest performance improvement occurring among firms that experience no turnover on their boards and among firms that do not change their board independence. We conclude that the large board turnover experienced by underperforming firms presents significant challenges for subsequent recovery.

Opacity fosters price contagion that exacerbates the speculative cycles of bubbles and crashes that create financial instability. We find that banks with larger investments in opaque assets benefitted more from intra-industry revaluations associated with announcements of mergers in the period 2000–2006. The findings are robust to controls for competitive effects, spillover effects from higher likelihood of takeover, changes in real estate prices, and interest rates. Non-merger banks that gained most from merger activities also experienced the largest price declines during the subsequent 2007–2008 financial crisis.

This paper comprehensively reviews the Accounting for Income Taxes (AFIT) literature. We begin by identifying four distinctive aspects of AFIT and briefly covering the rules surrounding AFIT. We then review the existing studies in detail and offer suggestions for future research. We emphasize the research questions that have been addressed (most of which relate to whether the tax accounts are used to manage earnings and whether the tax accounts are priced by equity market participants). We also highlight areas that have not received much research attention and that warrant future analysis.

Abstract This paper shows that a New Year's gambling preference of individual investors impacts prices and returns of assets with lottery features. January call options, especially the out-of-the-money calls, have higher retail demand and are the most expensive and actively traded. Lottery-type stocks outperform their counterparts in January but tend to underperform in other months. Retail sentiment is more bullish in lottery-type stocks in January than in other months. Furthermore, lottery-type Chinese stocks outperform in the Chinese New Year's Month but not in January. This New Year effect provides new insights into the broad phenomena related to the January effect.

We show that the reported tendency for performance pay to be associated with greater wage inequality at the top of the earnings distribution applies only to white workers. This results in the white-black wage differential among those in performance pay jobs growing over the earnings distribution even as the same differential shrinks over the distribution for those not in performance pay jobs. We show that this remains true even when examining suitable counterfactuals that hold observables constant between whites and blacks. We explore reasons behind our finding focusing on the interactions between discrimination, unmeasured ability, and selection.

ABSTRACT We find that lower ex ante earnings volatility leads to higher Post–Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD). PEAD is a function of both the magnitude of an earnings surprise and its persistence. While prior research has largely investigated market reactions to the magnitude of the earnings surprise, in this study we show that the persistence of the earnings surprise is equally important. A unique feature of the anomalous PEAD returns documented here concerns the association between abnormal returns and trading frictions. Besides demonstrating that firms with lower earnings volatility have higher abnormal returns, we also find that lower earnings volatility firms have lower trading frictions. Taken together, these findings imply that higher abnormal returns are associated with lower trading frictions. We exploit this implication to empirically demonstrate that PEAD returns due to earnings volatility are not concentrated in the firms with the largest trading frictions, which is in contrast to the findings in prior anomaly studies.