Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms' shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms seek to actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than is mandated by market regulations and...

We show that firms’ idiosyncratic volatility obeys a strong factor structure and that shocks to the common factor in idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) are priced. Stocks in the lowest CIV-beta quintile earn average returns 5.4% per year higher than those in the highest quintile. The CIV factor...

This article evaluates a large collection of systemic risk measures based on their ability to predict macroeconomic downturns. We evaluate 19 measures of systemic risk in the US and Europe spanning several decades. We propose dimension reduction estimators for constructing systemic risk indexes...

Investors in option markets price in a substantial collective government bailout guarantee in the financial sector, which puts a floor on the equity value of the financial sector as a whole, but not on the value of the individual firms. The guarantee makes put options on the financial sector...

We theoretically characterize the behavior of machine learning asset pricing models. We prove that expected out-of-sample model performance--in terms of SDF Sharpe ratio and test asset pricing errors--is improving in model parameterization (or "complexity"). Our empirical findings verify the...

The core statistical technology in artificial intelligence is the large-scale transformer network. We propose a new asset pricing model that implants a transformer in the stochastic discount factor. This structure leverages conditional pricing information via cross-asset information sharing and...