We document the trading activities over the period from June 1993 through March 1997 of the 223 largest traders of heating oil futures - traders who together account for 58% of the open interest in this market. Dividing these traders into eleven different groupings: refiners,...

Utilizing the large subset of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' market-making role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We investigate the determinants of...

We study the dynamics of cash-and-carry arbitrage using the U.S. crude oil market. Sizable arbitrage-related inventory movements occur at the NYMEX futures contract delivery point but not at other storage locations where, instead, operational factors explain most inventory changes. We add to the...

Utilizing subsets of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, purely as market-makers, and as both, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' marketmaking role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We find...

The procedures used in corporate bond event studies to date fail to control for heteroskedasticity due to differences in return volatility by term-to-maturity, rating, and other factors resulting in low test power. Bond return standardization yields considerably more powerful tests. Also, due to...

Exploring properties both of the EIA's natural gas and crude oil storage announcements and of analyst forecasts of the EIA storage figures, we find that analyst storage forecasts bring additional information to the market beyond seasonal patterns and past storage flows and that the market...

By Jensen's inequality, a model's forecasts of the variance and standard deviation of returns cannot both be unbiased. This paper explores the bias in GARCH type model forecasts of the standard deviation of returns, which we argue is the more appropriate volatility measure for most financial...

This paper explores differences in the impact of equally large positive and negative surprise return shocks in the aggregate U.S. stock market on: 1) the volatility predictions of asymmetric time series models, 2) implied volatility, and 3) realized volatility. Both asymmetric time series models...

This paper estimates how the shape of the implied volatility smile and the size of the variance risk premium relate to parameters of GARCH-type time-series models measuring how conditional volatility responds to return shocks. Markets in which return shocks lead to large increases in conditional...

Issues in the construction of corporate bond event studies using bond transaction data are explored. We show that the procedures used in studies to date have relatively low power because they fail to control for the substantial heteroskedasticity in bond returns due to differences in...