[Editorial: Presumably, academic journals exist and publish articles to disseminate new ideas. Somehow that simple goal has been lost. Today, articles appear in print only after a referee is convinced that all other alternative explanations for its results have been ruled out. In reality, no article can exclude every possible alternative, so this is basically an exercise in futility. The criterion for publication should be that once an article crosses some threshold it is good enough to publish. The problem seemingly lies in our inability to say "good enough." But this is a problem we can fix.]

[Academics responded to the challenges posed by the 2008 financial crisis with a flurry of studies. This collection of articles is just the academic community's first look into it. The articles begin with an examination at the last national housing price crash: the great depression of the 1930s. This is followed by articles looking at the current mortgage market and how it behaved. Did modern innovations reflect or add to the downturn? The next set of papers examines how non-financial firms were impacted by the crash. To what degree did credit worthy firms nevertheless find themselves without access to capital? The papers then end with a look into how the banking sector itself fared throughout this period.]

["The Review of Financial Studies" has among its missions the facilitation and promotion of a vigorous academic debate across unsettled questions in finance. This issue represents a cross section of views regarding one such debate: Can ourempirical models accurately forecast the equity premium any better than the historical mean? Or, is the forecast our empirical models give us any more accurate than what we would get by simply using the historical mean?]

[A number of empirical studies have reached the conclusion that stock price volatility cannot be fully explained within the standard dividend discount model. This article proposes a resolution based upon a model that contains both a random supply of risky assets and finitely lived agents who trade in a multiple security environment. As the analysis shows there exist 2^K equilibria when K securities trade. The low volatility equilibria have properties analogous to those found in the infinitely lived agent models of Campbell and Kyle (1991) and Wang (1993, 1994). In contrast, the high-volatility equilibria have very different characteristics. Within the high-volatility equilibria very large price variances can be generated with very small supply shocks. Adding securities to the economy further reduces the required supply shocks. Using previously established empirical results the model can reconcile the data with supply shocks that are less than 10% as large as observed return shocks. These results are shown to hold even when the dividend process is mean reverting.]

[We examine an adverse selection model of trading in which both informed and uninformed traders are rational, maximizing agents. Replacing the price inelastic "noise" or "liquidity" traders with strategic, utility-maximizing hedgers permits an explicit analysis of the uninformed traders' welfare, and demonstrates that several comparative statics obtained from the standard paradigm of Kyle (1984, 1985) are altered significantly upon endogenizing the trading motives of these agents. In contrast to extant models, market liquidity and price efficiency are both nonmonotonic in the number of uninformed hedgers in the market. Also, the welfare of hedgers monotonically decreases with the number of informed traders, despite greater competition between the informed.]

[A simple classical Walrasian framework is proposed for the study of manipulation among asymmetrically informed risk-averse traders in financial markets, and it is used to analyze the occurrence of a market breakdown in the trading system. Such a phenomenon occurs when the outsiders refuse to trade with the insiders because the informational motive for trade of the insider outweighs her hedging motive. We demonstrate the robustness of our results by proving that the market collapse condition extends not only to the linear strategy function, but to the whole class of feasible nonlinear strategy functions. Implications for insider-trading regulation are sketched.]

This article presents a framework for analyzing the dynamic effects of anticipated large demand pressures on asset risk premia. The authors show that large institutions who can time their entry into the market will trade either at the open or during periods of unusual demand pressures. They show that if these institutions do enter later in the day, they trade in the same direction as institutions which provide liquidity continuously; institutions therefore appear to exhibit 'herding' behavior. The authors also explore how changing the uncertainty of demand pressures late in the day affects trading costs throughout the day.

Michigan. I want to thank the audience members for their comments and for encouraging me to produce an editorial based on the speech. I also want to thank Professor Hirshleifer for both his comments on an earlier draft and for giving me the opportunity to publish the Review of Financial Studies ’ (RFS) first editorial. I also want to thank Martijn Cremers, Andrew Karolyi, Nancy Nash-Mendez, Paul Tetlock, and Michael Weisbach for their comments. Nothing in here should be construed as representing the views of the Society for Financial Studies or the current editorial board of the RFS. Editorial: Presumably, academic journals exist and publish articles to disseminate new ideas. Somehow that simple goal has been lost. Today, articles appear in print only after a referee is convinced that all other alternative explanations for its results have been ruled out. In reality, no article can exclude every possible alternative, so this is basically an exercise in futility. The criterion for publication should be that once an article crosses some threshold it is good enough to publish. The problem seemingly lies in our inability to say “good enough. ” But this is a problem we can fix. 2 Foreword Because this is an editorial, I want to warn the reader not to expect either the prose or evidence

Academics responded to the challenges posed by the 2008 financial crisis with a flurry of studies. This collection of articles is just the academic community's first look into it. The articles begin with an examination at the last national housing price crash: the great depression of the 1930s. This is followed by articles looking at the current mortgage market and how it behaved. Did modern innovations reflect or add to the downturn? The next set of papers examines how non-financial firms were impacted by the crash. To what degree did credit worthy firms nevertheless find themselves without access to capital? The papers then end with a look into how the banking sector itself fared throughout this period.

[This article develops a Kalman filter model to track dynamic mutual fund factor loadings. It then uses the estimates to analyze whether managers with market-timing ability can be identified ex ante. The primary findings are as follows: (i) Ordinary least squares (OLS) timing models produce false positives (nonzero alphas) at too high a rate with either daily or monthly data. In contrast, the Kalman filter model produces them at approximately the correct rate with monthly data; (ii) In monthly data, though the OLS models fail to detect any timing among fund managers, the Kalman filter does; (iii) The alpha and beta forecasts from the Kalman model are more accurate than those from the OLS timing models; (iv) The Kalman filter model tracks most fund alphas and betas better than OLS models that employ macroeconomic variables in addition to fund returns.]