Knowledge that Transforms

This article explores the premium for bearing the variance risk of the VIX index, called the variance-of-variance risk premium. I find that during the sample period from 2006 until 2014 trading strategies exploiting the difference between the implied and realized variance of the VIX index yield average excess returns of − 24.16% per month, with an alpha of − 16.98% after adjusting for Fama–French and Carhart risk factors as well as accounting for variance risk (both highly significant). The article provides further evidence of risk premium characteristics using corridor variance swaps and compares empirical results with the predictions of reduced-form and structural benchmark models.

We study the informational channel of financial contagion in the laboratory. In our experiment, two markets with privately informed subjects open sequentially. Subjects in the second market observe the history of trades and prices in the first market. Although in both markets private information is imperfectly aggregated, subjects in the second market make correct inferences from the information coming from the first market. As theory predicts, when fundamentals are correlated, contagion occurs in the laboratory; in contrast, with independent fundamentals, there is no contagion effect. In both cases, the correlation between asset prices is very close to the theoretical one.

The literature on international equity holdings distinguishes between home bias (overweighting of home stocks) and foreign bias (relative underweighting for more “distant” countries). The two biases can be integrated into one distance-based model. We define pure home bias as the excess of home bias relative to this model, and find pure home bias only in emerging markets. Countries with high tax rates and low credit standing have higher pure home bias, and more development comes with lower distance aversion. Methodologically, the choice of portfolio bias measure matters. We find the best measure to be a covariance-based measure relative to the world average.

Can financial institutions and markets enhance the discipline imposed by competitive product markets and thus improve resource allocation in the real economy? We address this question in the context of international trade, using disaggregated product-level data from seventy-one countries exporting to the USA. We show that exported products exit the US market sooner if they stand far away from the exporting country’s comparative advantage. This pattern is stronger when the exporting country has a well-developed banking system, but it is unaffected by the depth of stock markets. These results are in accordance with theories stressing the disciplining role of debt and monitoring abilities of banks.

Usual measures of the risk-taking incentives of bank CEOs do not capture the risk-shifting incentives that the exposure of a CEO’s wealth to his firm’s stock price (delta) creates in highly levered firms. We find evidence consistent with the importance of these incentives for bank CEOs: In a sample of large US financial firms, a higher pre-crisis delta is associated with a significantly higher probability of failure during the 2007–10 financial crisis in highly levered firms, but not in less levered firms.

Review of Finance, 2018, 1213–1247. doi: 10.1093/rof/rfx006 This article has been updated to re-order the authors as above and to add an additional citation in footnote 11.

We consider the relationship between trader emotions and asset market behavior. We create experimental asset markets with the structure first studied by Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988), which is known to generate price bubbles and crashes. To track traders’ emotions in real time, we analyze participants’ facial expressions with facereading software before and while the market is operating. We find that a positive emotional state correlates with purchases and overpricing. Fear correlates with selling, low prices, and price decreases. The experiment confirms the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related.

We investigate how differential exposures by German banks to the US real-estate market affect domestic lending in Germany when home prices started to decline in the USA. We find that banks with an exposure to the US real-estate sector and to conduits shift their domestic lending to industry–region combinations with lower insolvency ratios following a decrease in US home prices. These banks also contract their lending to German firms more than banks that do not have such exposure. We mainly document that possible losses abroad shift bank lending at home where the size of the effect depends on the type and the degree of exposure the bank has.

We introduce a reduced-form term structure model with closed-form solutions for yields where the short rate and market prices of risk are nonlinear functions of Gaussian state variables. The nonlinear model with three factors matches the time-variation in expected excess returns and yield volatilities of US Treasury bonds from 1961 to 2014. Yields and their variances depend on only three factors, yet the model exhibits features consistent with Unspanned Risk Premia (URP) and Unspanned Stochastic Volatility (USV).

We model sequential bidding in a private value English auction when it is costly to submit or revise a bid. We show that, even when bid costs approach zero, bidding occurs in repeated jumps, consistent with certain types of natural auctions such as takeover contests. In contrast with most past models of bids as valuation signals, every bidder has the opportunity to signal and increase the bid by a jump. Jumps communicate bidders’ information rapidly, leading to contests that are completed in a few bids. The model additionally predicts; informative delays in the start of bidding; that the probability of a second bid decreases in, and the jump increases in, the first bid; that objects are sold to the highest valuation bidder; and that revenue and efficiency relationships between different auctions hold asymptotically.