Investors can trade individual agency mortgage-backed securities as specified pools (SPs), or trade them through TBA forward contracts. Sellers in the TBA market deliver the cheapest possible pool that fulfills the contracts, so they are traded on a cheapest to deliver basis. More valuable...

Agency mortgage-backed securities trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to-be-announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as...

This paper considers a plethora of option-based measures of stock mispricing introduced by previous literature. These measures are based on differences between implied and actual stock prices, differences in implied volatilities across options, and on option trading volume. We show that stocks...

A number of papers document a strong negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and risk-adjusted stock returns. Using IHS Markit data on indicative borrowing fees, we show that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility are far more likely to be hard-to-borrow than stocks with low...

What matters to investors is not individual dividends but the commitment to pay the same or higher level of dividends for the foreseeable future. With this implicit contract the firm assures investors that “you can consume at the level of the dividend for the foreseeable future without fear of...