Did the August 2011 European short sale bans on financial stocks accomplish their goals? In order to answer this question, we use stock options' implied volatility skews to proxy for investors' risk aversion. We find that on ban announcement day, risk aversion levels rose for all stocks but more...

This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We argue that these options are overpriced because investors' overweight small probability events and overpay for such...

Low probability events are overweighted in the pricing of out-of-the-money index puts and single stock calls. This behavioral bias is strongly time-varying, and is linked to equity market sentiment and higher moments of the risk-neutral density. We _nd that our implied volatility (IV) sentiment...

This paper investigates how biases in macroeconomic forecasts are associated with economic surprises and market responses across asset classes around US data announcements. We find that the skewness of the distribution of economic forecasts is a strong predictor of economic surprises, suggesting...

Low probability events are overweighted in the pricing of out-of-the-money index puts and single stock calls. We find that this behavioral bias is strongly time-varying, linked to equity market sentiment, and higher moments of the risk-neutral density. An implied volatility (IV) sentiment...

This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We argue that these options are overpriced because investors overweight small probability events and overpay for such...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds becauseof serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky et al. (2004) derive mean,variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Followingtheir lead, adjusted downside and global...

During the Global Financial Crisis, regulators imposed short-selling bans to protect financial institutions. The rationale behind the bans was that "bear raids", driven by short-sellers, would increase the individual and systemic risk of financial institutions, especially for institutions with...

The experience in the period during and after the Asian crisis of 1997-98 has provoked an extensive debate about the credit rating agencies' evaluation of sovereign risk in emerging markets lending. This study analyzes the role of credit rating agencies in international financial markets,...

This paper deals with the proposed use of sovereign credit ratings in the Basel Accord on Capital Adequacy (Basel II) and considers its potential effect on emerging markets financ-ing. It investigates in a first attempt the consequences of the planned revisions on the two central aspects of...