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.

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.

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.

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.

Aggregate stock return volatility is both persistent and countercyclical. This paper tests whether it is possible to improve volatility forecasts at monthly and quarterly horizons by conditioning on additional macroeconomic variables. I find that several variables related to macroeconomic uncertainty, time-varying expected stock returns, and credit conditions Granger cause volatility. It is more difficult to find evidence that forecasts exploiting macroeconomic variables outperform a univariate benchmark out-of-sample. The most successful approaches involve simple combinations of individual forecasts. Predictive power associated with macroeconomic variables appears to concentrate around the onset of recessions.

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. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This paper studies the long-run properties of intertemporal distortions in a broad class of second-best economies. Our unified framework encompasses and extends many well-known models, such as variants of the Ramsey taxation model with aggregate or idiosyncratic risk, and economies with incentive compatibility constraints due to limited commitment, political economy, self-enforcement or private information, or combinations of these. We identify a sufficient condition that rules out permanent intertemporal distortions: if there exists an allocation that satisfies all constraints and eventually converges to the limiting first-best allocation, then intertemporal distortions are temporary in the second best. This result uncovers a common optimality principle linking the intertemporal allocation of resources with the ability to front-load distortions for this broad class of environments. A series of applications illustrates the significance of these findings.

This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy, whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks. We find that in municipalities headed by female mayors, the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher. This result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as for non-random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender-mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin. The likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male and in regions with less favourable attitudes towards working women. This evidence is suggestive that group dynamics are an important factor in driving the gender difference. Other interpretations receive less support in the data. Our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.