A new covariance matrix estimator is proposed under the assumption that at every time period all pairwise correlations are equal. This assumption, which is pragmatically applied in various areas of finance, makes it possible to estimate arbitrarily large covariance matrices with ease. The model,...

A conspicuous amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the 2007-2009 crisis. The difference in costs of out-of-the-money put options for individual banks, and puts on the financial sector index, increases fourfold from its pre-crisis...

Theoretical asset pricing models routinely assume that investors have heterogeneous information. We provide direct evidence of the importance of information asymmetry for asset prices and investor demands using plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of information caused by the closure of...

Can managers influence the liquidity of their 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 that such...

In empirical finance and in time series applied economics in general, the least squares model is the workhorse. In class there is much discussion of the assumptions of exogeneity, homoskedasticity and serial correlation. However in practice it may be unstable regression coefficients that are...

Building models for high dimensional portfolios is important in risk management and asset allocation. Here we propose a novel and fast way of estimating models of time-varying covariances that overcome an undiagnosed incidental parameter problem which has troubled existing methods when applied...

The volatility term structure (VTS) reflects market expectations of average asset volatility over different time horizons. Various stochastic volatility models provide forecasts of the VTS and how it shifts in response to changes in market conditions. This paper develops a methodology for...

The Multiplicative Error Model introduced by Engle (2002) for positive valued processes is specified as the product of a (conditionally autoregressive) scale factor and an innovation process with positive support. In this paper we propose a multivariate extension of such a model, by taking into...

We introduce a new model to measure unconditional volatility, the Spline-GARCH. The model is applied to equity markets for 50 countries for up to 50 years of daily data. Macroeconomic determinants of unconditional volatility are investigated. It is found that volatility in macroeconomic factors...

The volatility term structure (VTS) reflects market expectations of asset volatility over different horizons. These expectations change over time, giving dynamic structure to the VTS. This paper evaluates volatilitymodels on the basis of their performance in hedging option price changes due to...