We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...

What role does stock investment play in the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? We study this question using a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous households. Following a monetary tightening, stock market participants rebalance their investments away from stocks, in line with...

The 2007-09 financial crisis highlighted the vulnerability of financial institutions linked by a complex web of credit default swap (CDS) contracts, sparking a wave of regulatory changes to the structure of the market. In this paper, we provide broad evidence on the evolution of the CDS market...

We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity-market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of...

We provide a preference-based rationale for endogenous overconfidence. Horizon-dependent risk aversion, combined with a possibility to forget, can generate overconfidence and excessive risk taking in equilibrium. An "anxiety prone" agent, who is more risk-averse to imminent than to distant...

In this paper, I provide evidence that currency stop-loss orders contribute to rapid, self-reinforcing price movements, or "price cascades". Stop-loss orders, which instruct a dealer to buy (sell) a certain amount of currency at the market rate once the rate has risen (fallen) to a prespecified...

Many commentators have suggested that companies pay top executives with deferred compensation, a type of incentive known as inside debt. Recent SEC disclosure reforms greatly increased the transparency of deferred compensation. We investigate stockholder and bondholder reactions to companies’...

We track 38,000 money market trades from execution to delivery and return to provide a first empirical analysis of settlement delays in financial markets. In line with predictions from recent models showing that financial claims are settled strategically, we document a tendency by lenders to...