We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks than those with permanent shocks. However, credit default swap spreads and model-implied default probabilities do not distinguish between such shocks. 

Using a novel database on venue short sales and market design characteristics, we ask: Where do short sellers exploit their information advantage?

In the run up to the financial crisis, the essential functions financial intermediaries played seemed to become less important. Commercial and industrial loans, as well as residential mortgages, the quintessential banking products, were securitized and sold.

A roadmap for inclusive and equitable development is proposed which has four core elements that will lead to greater shared prosperity in Durham: a sustainability scorecard; a collective ambition community mobilization strategy; a more inclusive entrepreneurial/business ecosystem; and an equitable community economic development innovations fund. These activities aim to support historically underutilized businesses and invest in workforce development partnerships that support working poor civil servants at-risk of being priced out of and displaced from Durham’s housing market. Utilizing these tools and leveraging the four corners of intellectual assets that exist at Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University should strategically position Durham to be one of the most inclusive, equitable, and sustainable cities in America.

In this paper, we empirically analyze the determinants of excess inventory announcement and the stock market reaction to the announcement in the US retail sector. We examine if the firm’s operational competence, as measured by total factor productivity (TFP), can explain the retailer’s excess inventory announcement. We also investigate if the stock market reaction to such announcements is conditional on the operational competence of the announcing firm. We use a combined dataset on excess inventory announcements, annual financial statements, and daily stock prices of publicly traded retailers in the USA between 1990 and 2011.

Our findings suggest that the influence of precautionary savings on interest rates is elevated during bad-environment economic times, with interest rates responding much more negatively to time-varying perceptions of uncertainty.

People differ greatly in their financial risk taking behaviour. This heterogeneity has been associated with differences in brain activity, but only in laboratory settings using constrained behaviours. However, it is important to understand how these measures transfer to real life conditions, because the willingness to invest in riskier assets has a direct and considerable effect on long-term wealth accumulation.

Although private credit funds have rapidly grown into a standalone asset class over the last decade, little is known about the aggregate performance of these funds. To provide a first look at absolute and relative performance, we utilize the Burgiss database of 476 private credit funds with nearly $480 billion in committed capital, including a subset of 155 direct lending funds.

We propose a production-based general equilibrium model to study the link between timing of cash flows and expected returns both in the cross section of stocks and along the aggregate equity term structure.

This paper argues that the seemingly lower returns on distressed stocks are partly the result of estimation bias and proposes an exact theoretical correction that can be applied in practice.

Over 1960 to 2017, we show that a positive risk premium from holding high-beta stocks (versus low-beta stocks) and small-cap stocks (versus large-cap stocks) is reliably earned only after the expected stock-market volatility breaches an approximate top-quintile threshold. The high conditional average returns with this nonlinear risk-return phenomenon are persistently evident over months t+1 to t+6 following a volatility-threshold breach in month t-1.

The prevailing view of implied volatility comovements, IVC, defined as the correlation between a firm’s implied volatility and the market’s implied volatility, is that they indicate the presence of systematic volatility risk to the firm’s investors. We take a different stance and conjecture that implied volatility comovements can also indicate expected information arrival for both the firm and aggregate equity markets, and we find evidence supporting this view.