Using granular data from the Spanish Central Credit Register, we study the contagion of financial distress via the credit quality channel in the Spanish interbank market. We propose a non-linear contagion mechanism dependent on banks’ balance-sheet structure (specifically, their leverage...

We analyze whether the timing of public information releases affects risk-sharing and pricing in a pure exchange economy. Information releases do not matter if agents have time additive preferences, homogeneous beliefs and access to complete markets. In the case of heterogeneity in agents'...

This paper investigates the asset pricing implications of investor disagreement about the likelihood of a systematic disaster. I specify a general equilibrium model with multiple trees and heterogeneous beliefs about rare event risk, to understand how risk-sharing mechanisms affect equity and...

The properties of information, including "information uncertainty", can be understood only Bayesianly. Common formulations that define information uncertainty in terms of just statistical "precision" (i.e. sampling variance), or any one estimator characteristic (e.g. bias), are inadequate for...

We provide empirical evidence that changes in the level of the freedom of the press have a substantial impact on important risk measures. Using data from the Freedom of the Press annual report to capture how freely the news media can operate, we investigate how changes in the freedom of the...

Standard models of Bayesian updating predict a stronger investor reaction to new information when those investors are more uncertain about the firm. However, prior empirical literature has struggled to find widespread evidence in support of this prediction. This paper tests two explanations for...

This paper investigates how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using U.S. public firm earnings conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms exhibiting more pessimistic tone during the current year-end call experience...

We introduce the concept of 'news entropy' to characterise the relationship between news coverage and the economy. Intuitively, news entropy decreases as the news focus on a smaller set of pressing topics. We observe that news entropy exhibits clear negative spikes close to important economic,...

This paper investigates empirically the dynamics of investors' beliefs and Bayesian uncertainty about the state of the economy as state variables that describe the time-variation in investment opportunities. Using measures of uncertainty constructed from the state probabilities estimated from...

We examine the effects of political uncertainty surrounding the outcome of U.S. presidential elections on financial market quality. We postulate those effects to depend on a positive relation between political uncertainty and information asymmetry among investors, ambiguity about the quality of...