We measure market reactions to announcements concerning liquidity regulation, a key innovation in the Basel framework. Our initial results show that liquidity regulation attracts negative abnormal returns. However, the price responses are less pronounced when coinciding announcements concerning capital regulation are backed out, suggesting that markets do not consider liquidity regulation to be binding. Bank- and country-specific characteristics also matter. Liquid balance sheets and high charter values increase abnormal returns whereas smaller long-term funding mismatches reduce abnormal returns. Banks located in countries with large government debt and tight interbank conditions or with prior domestic liquidity regulation display lower abnormal returns.

I find that short-maturity Treasury-bill yields have unique information about risk premiums that is not spanned by long-maturity Treasury-bond yields. I estimate 2 components of risk premiums: long term and short term. The long-term component steepens the slope of yield curves and has a forecastability horizon of longer than 1 year. In contrast, the short-term component affects Treasury-bill yields but is almost invisible from Treasury bonds, has a forecastability horizon of less than 1 quarter, and is related to bond liquidity premiums.

We examine whether sizable initial public offerings (IPOs) affect the whole market. Using a Chinese IPO sample, we find robust evidence that sizable IPOs depress the market price on not only the listing day but also the offering (subscription) day. The impact on the market is negatively correlated with IPO size on the listing day. However, this impact is largely transitory. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) often places a moratorium on IPOs to support the market, which seems ineffective as the negative IPO effect is transitory and moratoriums are not perceived as good news.

We consider the estimation methods for the rank of a beta matrix corresponding to a multifactor model and study which method would be appropriate for data with a large number of assets. Our simulation results indicate that a restricted version of Cragg and Donald’s (1997) Bayesian information criterion estimator is quite reliable for such data. We use this estimator to analyze some selected asset pricing models with U.S. stock returns. Our results indicate that the beta matrix from many models fails to have full column rank, suggesting that risk premiums in these models are underidentified.

There is a standard trade-off in compensation contracts between the provision of incentives and insurance. We hypothesize that this trade-off influences the precision with which firm performance is measured. We find that firm outcomes are measured less precisely when chance plays a large role in these outcomes. Further, this precision is determined through the choice of shares outstanding. This has several novel implications. Nominal stock prices can remain constant over time, and firms with unpredictable cash flows should have more shares and lower stock price levels, all else equal. We find evidence consistent with these implications.

We study changes in market quality associated with 9 modifications to the New York State securities transaction tax (STT) between 1932 and 1981 and 3 changes to the federal STT between 1932 and 1966. We find that when there is an increase in the level of an STT, individual stock volatility increases, bid–ask spreads widen, price impacts are greater, and volume decreases. We examine the propensity of traders to switch trading locations to avoid the tax and find mixed evidence that they will change locations. Overall, our findings support the notion that the imposition of or increases in an STT harm market quality.

This paper specifies term structure dynamics by a recursive cascade of heterogeneously persistent factors. The cascade naturally orders economic shocks by their adjustment speeds, and generates smooth interest-rate curves in closed form. For a class of specifications, the number of parameters is invariant to the size of the state space, and the term structure converges to a stochastic limit as the state dimension goes to infinity. High-dimensional specifications fit observed term structure almost perfectly, match the observed low correlation between movements in different maturities, and produce stable interest-rate forecasts that outperform lower-dimensional specifications.