We explore the link between a firm's stock returns and its credit risk using a simple insight from structural models following Merton (1974): risk premia on equity and credit instruments are related because all claims on assets must earn the same compensation per unit of risk. Consistent with...

We empirically study whether systematic over-the-counter (OTC) market frictions drive the large unexplained common factor in yield spread changes. Using transaction data on U.S. corporate bonds, we find that marketwide inventory, search, and bargaining frictions explain 23.4% of the variation of...

We show that the mixed evidence on how financial leverage affects stock returns can be reconciled by accounting for firms' debt maturity structures. In our model, firms jointly optimize leverage and debt maturity by balancing benefits and rollover risk of short-term relative to long-term debt....

Inventory models of dealership markets imply that intermediaries reduce their exposure to inventory risk by offering prices different from fundamental values. Therefore, inventory levels should affect asset prices and thus returns. We explore the cross-sectional relation between US corporate...

We classify the sentiment of a large sample of StockTwits messages as bullish,bearish or neutral, and create a stock-aggregate daily sentiment polarity measure.Polarity is positively associated with contemporaneous stock returns. On average,polarity is not able to predict next-day stock returns....

We use machine learning methods to predict stock return volatility. Our out-of-sample prediction of realised volatility for a large cross-section of US stocks over the sample period from 1992 to 2016 is on average 44.1% against the actual realised volatility of 43.8% with an R2 being as high as...