We investigate the price dynamics of large market-capitalization U.S. equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in order to uncover trader motivations and strategy. We show that prices of highly liquid ETFs can deviate significantly from their daily net asset values. By adjusting for changes in...

We study the influence on firm risks of NASDAQ and NYSE firm payout initiations and omissions. These payout events can be interpreted as managerial signals of firm financial life-cycle maturation resulting in concomitant changes in firm risks. We remove confounding payout types and we match on...

This paper introduces a new family of portmanteau tests for serial correlation. Using the wavelet transform, we decompose the variance of the underlying process into the variance of its low frequency and of its high frequency components and we design a variance ratio test of no serial...

This paper introduces the concept of risk parameter in conditional volatility models of the form ϵt=σt(θ0)ηt and develops statistical procedures to estimate this parameter. For a given risk measure r, the risk parameter is expressed as a function of the volatility coefficients θ0 and the...

Two new methodologies are introduced to improve inference in the evaluation of mutual fund performance against benchmarks. First, the benchmark models are estimated using panel methods with both fund and time effects. Second, the non-normality of individual mutual fund returns is accounted for...

We suggest a semi-nonparametric estimator for the call-option price surface. The estimator is a bivariate tensor-product B-spline. To enforce no-arbitrage constraints across strikes and expiry dates, we establish sufficient no-arbitrage conditions on the control net of the B-spline surface. The...

This paper develops an indirect inference (Gourieroux et al., 1993; Smith, 1993) estimation method for a large class of dynamic equilibria. Our approach consists of constructing econometrically tractable auxiliary equilibria, obtained by simplifying the economic primitives of the structural...

We extend the asymmetric, stochastic, volatility model by modeling the return-volatility distribution nonparametrically. The novelty is modeling this distribution with an infinite mixture of Normals, where the mixture unknowns have a Dirichlet process prior. Cumulative Bayes factors show our...

A novel Bayesian method for inference in dynamic regression models is proposed where both the values of the regression coefficients and the importance of the variables are allowed to change over time. We focus on forecasting and so the parsimony of the model is important for good performance. A...

We construct a spot volatility estimator for high-frequency financial data which contain market microstructure noise. We prove consistency and derive the asymptotic distribution of the estimator. A data-driven method is proposed to select the scale parameter and the bandwidth parameter in the...