Using firm-level data from 23 developed markets, we document a positive association between overall firm-level governance quality and the informativeness of earnings announcements measured by abnormal stock return variance. This finding is robust after controlling for the potential endogeneity...

In a sample of U.S. stocks, higher stock lending fees predict significantly lower excess returns beyond shorting demand and loan supply. This relation is stronger after October 2008 which is likely attributable to a regime shift in the lending market with the onset of the Global Financial...

The concept of a market portfolio plays an important role in many financial theories and models. Knowledge of each asset's share of the invested capital markets is both useful information and a good starting point for investors considering the appropriate allocation to the asset. In our latest...

We investigate execution quality issues in the OTC single-name credit default swap (CDS) market using confidential transactions-level trade repository data. Specifically, we analyze the impact of counterparties' matching and negotiation abilities on the terms of trade of CDS contracts, under...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada's Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

A new economic revolution liberating financial markets? Seeks to answer some of the questions driving the existential crisis embroiling finance: What is currency? What is value? What is a business? What is a bank, even?This article discusses how regulatory reform, transformative technologies,...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada's Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

The risks to global financial stability posed by recent defaults by government borrowers have, for the most part, been manageable. However, the dynamics underpinning the ad hoc arrangements for resolving sovereign defaults are changing. Public debt burdens in many advanced economies are set to...

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the international linkages among local, country-specific stock market factors in order to better understand the dependence structure of increasingly integrated world financial markets. The seeming discordance between Fama and French (1998) and...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...