We analyze whether IQ influences trading behavior, performance, and transaction costs. The analysis combines equity return, trade, and limit order book data with two decades of scores from an intelligence test administered to nearly every Finnish male of draft age. Controlling for a variety of...

This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential...

An analysis of Finnish investors' stock trades shows that they realize losses more than gains towards the end of December. Moreover, they repurchase the same stocks recently sold. The repurchase rate depends on loss magnitude, firm size, and how late in the year the sale takes place. This...

This paper argues that liquidity differences between government securities and short term Eurodollar borrowings account for interest rate swap spreads. It then models the convenience of liquidity as a linear function of two mean-reverting state variables and values it. The interest rate swap...

Multihorizon temporal relationships between stock returns are complex due to confounding sources of return premia, microstructure effects, and changes in the relationship over various horizons. We find the relation to be further complicated by the sign and consistency of the past return that...

A security design model shows that multinational firms needing to finance their operations should issue different securities to investors in different countries in order to aggregate their disparate information about domestic and foreign cash flows. However, if the firm becomes bankrupt,...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpretable in terms of the characteristics of the underlying securities. The...

This study analyzes the automobile purchase behavior of all residents of two Finnish provinces over several years. It finds that a consumer's purchases are strongly influenced by the purchases of his neighbors, particularly purchases in the recent past and by neighbors who are geographically...

Prior experimental and empirical research documents that many investors have a lower propensity to sell those stocks on which they have a capital loss. This behavioral phenomenon, known as 'the disposition effect,' has implications for equilibrium prices. We investigate the temporal pattern of...

This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential...