Knowledge that Transforms

Weekly returns of stock portfolios exhibit substantial autocorrelation. Analytical studies suggest that nonsynchronous trading is capable of explaining from 5% to 65% of the autocorrelation. The varying importance of nonsynchronous trading in these studies arises primarily from differing assumptions regarding nontrading periods of stocks. We simulate the effects of nonsynchronous trading by sampling stock returns from a return generating process using transactions data to obtain the precise time of each stock's last trade. We find that simulated weekly portfolio returns exhibit autocorrelations that are roughly 25% that of their observed (CRSP) weekly returns.

Journal Article Changes of Numeraire for Pricing Futures, Forwards, and Options Get access Mark Schroder Mark Schroder Michigan State University Address correspondence to Mark Schroder, The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management, Department of Finance, Michigan State University, 323 Eppley Center, East Lansing, MI 48824-1121, or email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 12, Issue 5, October 1999, Pages 1143–1163, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/12.5.1143 Published: 01 June 2015

This article analyzes the problem facing an agent who has a long-term commodity supply commitment and who wishes to hedge that commitment using short-maturity commodity futures contracts. As time evolves, the agent has to roll the hedge as old futures contracts mature and new futures contracts are listed. This gives rise to hedge errors. The optimal hedging strategy is characterized in a world where contracts of several different maturities coexist. The strategy is independent both of the agent's risk aversion and, under certain conditions, of beliefs about expected returns from holding futures contracts. The methodology is compared with approaches based on dynamic models of the term structure. It is tested on data from the oil futures market.

When a market order arrives, the NYSE specialist can offer a price one tick better than the limit orders on the book and trade for his own account. Alternatively, the specialist can "stop" the market order, which means he guarantees execution at the current quote but provides the possibility of price improvement. My model shows that specialists can use stops to sample the future order flow before making a commitment to trade. I present empirical evidence that both stops and immediate price improvement impose adverse selection costs on limit order traders.

This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreads in the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competition primarily by the number of dealers active in the market and find that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition, even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expected level of competition is time varying, highly predictable, and displays a strong seasonal component that in part is induced by geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hour trading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition of one more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by 1.7%

This article investigates the long-term equity performance of Japanese firms issuing convertible debt and equity. We find that issuing firms perform poorly (except for equity rights issues) compared to nonissuing firms even though the stock-price reaction to convertible debt and equity issues is not negative for Japanese firms. This underperformance is strongest for firms issuing public convertible debt. In contrast to the United States, poor performance is not concentrated in smaller firms and in firms with a high market-to-book ratio. Simple behavioral explanations advanced for the new issue puzzle in the United States do not seem consistent with the Japanese experience.

We examine communication in laboratory games with asymmetric information. Sellers know true asset qualities. Potential buyers only know the quality distribution. Prohibiting communication, we document the degree of adverse selection. Then we examine two alternative communication mechanisms. Under “cheap talk”, each seller can announce any subset of qualities. Under “antifraud”, the subset must include the true quality. Both mechanisms improve market efficiency, but very differently. Relying on sellers' frequently exaggerated claims, buyers often overpay under cheap talk. Efficiency gains come at the buyer's expense. The antifraud rule improves efficiency further and eliminates the wealth transfer from buyers to sellers.

We account for the relation between stock returns and inflation with two independent disturbances: supply shocks and demand shocks. Supply shocks reflect real output shocks and cause a negative relation between stock returns and inflation, while demand shocks are mainly due to monetary shocks and generate a positive relation between stock returns and inflation. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that the stock return–inflation relation varies over time and across countries, depending on the relative importance of the two types of shocks. Our empirical evidence is based on pre- and postwar periods in the United States, as well as the postwar period in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany.

We provide a simple binomial framework to value American-style derivatives subject to trading restrictions. The optimal investment of liquid wealth is solved simultaneously with the early exercise decision of the nontraded derivative. No-short-sales constraints on the underlying asset manifest themselves in the form of an implicit dividend yield in the risk-neutralized process for the underlying asset. One consequence is that American call options may be optimally exercised prior to maturity even when the underlying asset pays no dividends. Applications to executive stock options (ESO) are presented: it is shown that the value of an ESO could be substantially lower than that computed using the Black–Scholes model. We also analyze nontraded payoffs based on a price that is imperfectly correlated with the price of a traded asset.

In many real-world situations, agents must formulate option exercise strategies with imperfect information. In such a setting, agents may infer the private signals of other agents through their observed exercise strategies. The building of an office building, the drilling of an exploratory oil well, and the commitment of a pharmaceutical company toward the research of a new drug all convey private information to other market participants. This article develops an equilibrium framework for option exercise games with asymmetric private information. Many interesting aspects of the patterns of equilibrium exercise are analyzed. In particular, informational cascades, where agents ignore their private information and jump on the exercise bandwagon, may arise endogenously.