Prior research has found that investors have strong preferences for stocks with positive skewness. These preferences have been shown to lead to price premiums and subsequent underperformance. This study extends this growing body of literature by testing whether the underperformance of stocks...

Using a unique empirical approach that accounts for the possibility that financial market crashes are endogenously determined by market structures, this study examines how economic freedom contribute to crashes in financial markets. On one hand, economic freedom might provide an unregulated...

Economic theory suggests that speculative trading can lead to instability in financial markets. Using a novel dataset on retail trading activity in the US, this study extends the literature and investigates the impact of retail (speculative) trading on the volatility of the financial markets...