We examine whether and to what extent business shocks explain the puzzling instabilities of corporate leverage. We find that business shocks explain a large portion of the unexplained leverage deviation, cross-sectional leverage position migration, and evaporating leverage similarities in the...

α (“Alpha”) has symbolic importance on the investments side of finance. That is, a fundamental pillar of modern finance theory is the risk-return relation, and traditionally alpha is taken to represent the degree of “mispricing” in asset returns. But, such an interpretation is not...

We argue that uncertainty network structures extracted from option prices contain valuable information for business cycles. Classifying U.S. industries according to their contribution to system-related uncertainty across business cycles, we uncover an uncertainty hub role for the communications,...

This paper investigates whether there is a banking risk premium that helps explain the returns of US publicly listed firms. We assess this phenomenon in the context of the capital asset pricing model and the Fama and French three-factor model. We use bank size to create the banking factor – a...

We argue that arbitrageurs will strategically limit their initial investment in an arbitrage opportunity in anticipation of further mispricing caused by the deepening of noise traders' misperceptions. Such ‘noise momentum' is an important determinant of the overall arbitrage process. We design...

We present an analysis of the determinants of Asia-Pacific banks’ extent of derivative activities. Our findings suggest that the probability of financial distress and economies of scale arguments are important in this regard. Further analyses reveal that Asia-Pacific dealer banks tend to use...