This paper examines whether analysts resident in a country make more precise earnings forecasts for firms in that country than analysts who are not resident in that country. Using a sample of 32 countries, we find that there is an economically and statistically significant analyst local...

Option theory predicts that mortgage default or prepayment will be exercised if the call or put option is “in the money.” We extend our analysis to commercial mortgages using data from commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). The paper presents a model of the competing risks of mortgage...

Many goods are marketed after first stating a list price, with the expectation that the eventual sales price will differ. In this paper we first extend search theory to include the seller setting a list price. Holding constant the mean of the buyers’ distribution of potential offers for a...

This study seeks to identify which factors are important for explaining the time-series and cross-section variation in global stock returns. We evaluate firm characteristics, like size, earnings/price, cash flow/price, dividend/price, book-to-market equity, leverage, momentum, that have been...

I develop and test the theoretical predictions that when investor overreaction to market-wide news is larger, firm valuations in the cross section become more dispersed and stocks earn lower expected returns. Consistent with these predictions, measures of cross-sectional dispersion of firm...

Despite the disappearance of formal barriers to international investment across countries, we find that the average home bias of U.S. investors towards the 46 countries with the largest equity markets did not fall from 1994 to 2004 when countries are equally weighted but fell when countries are...

Merton Miller was at the center of the transformation of academic finance from a descriptive field to a science. His principal contribution to this transformation was the introduction of arbitrage arguments which underlie most theoretical contributions in finance and remain central to the way...

We examine whether hedge funds experience contagion. First, we consider whether extreme movements in equity, fixed income, and currency markets are contagious to hedge funds. Second, we investigate whether extreme adverse returns in one hedge fund style are contagious to other hedge fund styles....