How did problems in a relatively small portion of the home mortgage market trigger the most severe financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression? Several developments played a role, including the proliferation of complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives with highly...

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Shleifer and Vishny (SV) pointed out some of the practical and theoretical problems associated with assuming that rational risk-arbitrage would quickly drive asset prices back to long-run equilibrium. In particular, they showed that the possibility that asset price disequilibrium would worsen,...

This paper argues that inferring long-horizon asset return predictability from the properties of vector autoregressive (VAR) models on relatively short spans of data is potentially unreliable. We illustrate the problems that can arise by reexamining the findings of Bekaert and Hodrick(1992), who...

We analyze and assess the impact of macroeconomic announcements on the discontinuities in many assets: stock index futures, bond futures, exchange rates, and gold. We use bi-power variation and the recently proposed non-parametric techniques of Lee and Mykland (2006) to extract jumps. Beyond...

Consistent with findings in other markets, implied volatility is a biased predictor of the realized volatility of gold futures. No existing explanation—including a price of volatility risk—can completely explain the bias, but much of this apparent bias can be explained by persistence and...

This paper tests the small sample properties of Hansen's (1982) Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) on simulated data from a consumption based asset pricing model. In finite samples the estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the discount parameter are strongly biased due to...

This paper argues that major governments should actively manage their foreign exchange portfolios to maximize the risk-adjusted return to the taxpayer by exploiting long-term, fundamental based predictability in floating exchange rates. Such transactions—equivalent to foreign exchange...

This article discusses the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market. Treasury securities are nominally riskless debt instruments issued by the U.S. government. Microstructural analysis is a field of economics/finance that examines the roles played by heterogenous agents,...

Shleifer and Vishny (1997) pointed out some of the practical and theoretical problems associated with assuming that rational risk-arbitrage would quickly drive asset prices back to long-run equilibrium. In particular, they showed that the possibility that asset price disequilibrium would worsen,...