This study examines the impact of cash holdings on firm value before and during the 2008 financial crisis. In answering this question, our analysis assesses the conditioning effect of financial constraints and corporate governance. In our core analysis we show that the equity market places a...

Employing daily data over the period 1987-2010, we examine the diversifying, hedging and safe haven properties of gold bullion, gold stocks, gold mutual funds and gold exchange traded funds (ETFs). First, with regard to gold bullion, we document a clear and strong hedging role over a mere...

Fund families are centrally managed, and can directly control resource allocations between funds. We quantify multiple manageable fund family attributes, and examine their combined effects upon returns and investor flows. We focus upon five attributes that are exclusively manageable by fund...

This paper investigates and compares the determinants of fund flows for socially responsible investment (SRI) funds and conventional funds. We consider the impact of current and past measures of monthly and annual return on fund flow. The results suggest SRI fund flows are less sensitive to...

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...