This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks...

"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 always appropriate...

We provide empirical evidence within the context of cryptocurrency markets that the returns from liquidity provision, proxied by the returns of a short-term reversal strategy, are primarily concentrated in trading pairs with lower levels of market activity. Empirically, we focus on a moderately...

Industry classification groups firms into finer partitions to help investments and empirical analysis. To overcome the well-documented limitations of existing industry definitions, like their stale nature and coarse categories for firms with multiple operations, we employ a clustering approach...

We examine if extreme weather exposure impacts firms' cost of equity. Motivated by a consumption-based asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents, we reveal the existence of an extreme weather risk premium in the cross-section of stock returns. In the period from 1995 to 2019, domestic U.S....

The latest development in empirical Asset Pricing is the use of Machine Learning methods to address the problem of the factor zoo. These techniques offer great flexibility and prediction accuracy but require special care as they strongly depart from traditional Econometrics. We review and...