psychological factors and stock option exercise we investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50 000 employees at seven corporations controlling for economic factors psychological factors influence exercise consistent with psychological models of beliefs employees exercise in response to stock price trends exercise is positively related to stock returns during the preceding month and negatively related to returns over longer horizons consistent with psychological models of values that include reference points employee exercise activity roughly doubles when the stock price exceeds the maximum price attained during the previous year

a general equilibrium model of portfolio insurance this article examines the effects of portfolio insurance on market and asset price dynamics in a general equilibrium continuous time model portfolio insurers are modeled as expected utility maximizing agents martingale methods are employed in solving the individual agents dynamic consumption portfolio problems comparisons are made between the optimal consumption processes optimally invested wealth and portfolio strategies of the portfolio insurers and normal agents at a general equilibrium level comparisons across economies reveal that the market volatility and risk premium are decreased and the asset and market price levels increased by the presence of portfolio insurance article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

equilibrium asset pricing with epstein zin and loss averse investors abstract we study multi period equilibrium asset pricing in an economy with epstein zin ez agents whose preferences for consumption are represented by recursive utility and with loss averse la agents who derive additional utility of gains and losses and are averse to losses we propose an equilibrium gain loss ratio for stocks and show that the la agents are more less risk averse than the ez agents if their degree of loss aversion is higher lower than this ratio when all the agents have unitary relative risk aversion degree and elasticity of intertemporal substitution we prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium and the market dominance of the ez agents in the long run finally we extend our results to the case in which the la agents use probability weighting in their evaluation of gains and losses

a dynamic structural model for stock return volatility and trading volume an examination is made of an adaptive beliefs model that is able to roughly reproduce the following features seen in the data 1 the autocorrelation functions of the volatility of returns and trading volume are positive with slowly decaying tails 2 the cross correlation function of volatility is approximately zero for squared returns with past and future volumes and is positive for squared returns with current volumes 3 abrupt changes in prices and returns occur that are hard to attach to news the last feature is obtained because the law of large numbers can fail in the large economy limit

prospect theory and market quality abstract we study equilibrium trading strategies and market quality in an economy in which speculators display preferences consistent with prospect theory kahneman and tversky 39 tversky and kahneman 63 i e loss aversion and mild risk seeking in losses loss aversion risk seeking in losses induces speculators to trade less more and less cautiously more aggressively with their private information but also makes them less more inclined to purchase private information when it is costly in order to mitigate enhance their perceived risk of a trading loss we demonstrate that these forces have novel nontrivial state dependent effects on equilibrium market liquidity price volatility trading volume market efficiency and information production

consumer ruthlessness and mortgage default during the 2007 to 2009 housing bust from 2007 to 2009 u s house prices plunged and mortgage defaults surged while ostensibly consistent with widespread ruthless default analysis of detailed mortgage and house price data indicates that borrowers do not walk away until they are deeply underwater far deeper than traditional models predict the evidence suggests that lender recourse is not the major driver of this result we argue that emotional and behavioral factors play an important role in decisions to continue paying borrower reluctance to walk away implies that the moral hazard cost of default as a form of social insurance may be lower than suspected this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

optimal portfolio choice under loss aversion this paper analyzes the optimal investment strategy for loss averse investors assuming a complete market and general ito processes for the asset prices the loss averse investor follows a partial portfolio insurance strategy when the investor s planning horizon is short less than 5 years he or she considerably reduces the initial portfolio weight of stocks compared to an investor with smooth power utility the empirical section of the paper estimates the level of loss aversion implied by historical u s stock market data using a representative agent model we find that loss aversion and risk aversion cannot be disentangled empirically

portfolio choice and trading volume with loss averse investors this paper presents a model of portfolio choice and stock trading volume with lossaverse investors the demand function for risky assets is discontinuous and non monotonic as wealth rises beyond a threshold investors follow a generalized portfolio insurance strategy this behavior is consistent with the evidence in favor of the disposition effect in addition loss averse investors will not hold stocks unless the equity premium is quite high the elasticity of the aggregate demand curve changes substantially depending on the distribution of wealth across investors in an equilibrium setting the model generates positive correlation between trading volume and stock return volatility but suggests that this relationship should be non linear

the implications of first order risk aversion for asset market risk premiums abstract in an effort to explain simultaneously the excess return predictability observed in equity bond and foreign exchange markets we incorporate preferences exhibiting first order risk aversion into a general equilibrium two country monetary model when we calibrate the model to us and japanese data we find that first order risk aversion substantially increases excess return predictability however this increased predictability is insufficient to match the data we conclude that the observed patterns of excess return predictability are unlikely to be explained purely by time varying risk premiums generated by highly risk averse agents in a complete markets economy

sex differences in access to a small enterprise development fund in peru abstract in an attempt to ensure that the direct benefits of an urban small enterprise project were reaching women the industrial bank of peru undertook a study of the constraints to women s access to a major credit program it had initiated in the squatter settlements pueblos jo venes of lima the study found that the low proportion of women among the program s borrowers was not due to more women being rejected when they applied for loans but to the fact that few women applied high collateral requirements and complicated application procedures deterred women from applying those women who did apply received smaller loans than men and were concentrated in garment manufacture services and commerce taking these factors into account the authors make recommendations for ways to enhance women s participation in the credit scheme and similar small enterprise programs in the developing countries

a comparative study of portfolio insurance abstract this paper undertakes a comparative study of portfolio insurance under a variety of modeling strategies specifically we focus on portfolio insurers who derive utility from horizon wealth with marginal utility tending smoothly to infinity at some pre specified floor we solve for the optimal consumption portfolio wealth of these portfolio insurers and compare with constrained portfolio insurers and normal agents general equilibrium conditions are contrasted under pure exchange and production type models while the market price level is unambiguously increased under pure exchange under production the effect on market level is state dependent in both models the market volatility and risk premium are decreased by portfolio insurance the paper also investigates the possible relationship between portfolio insurance type trading strategies and market volatility

stock prices and volume the authors undertake a comprehensive investigation of price and volume co movement using daily new york stock exchange data from 1928 to 1987 they adjust the data to take into account well known calendar effects and long run trends to describe the process they use a seminonparametric estimate of the joint density of current price change and volume conditional on past price changes and volume four empirical regularities are found 1 positive correlation between conditional volatility and volume 2 large price movements are followed by high volume 3 conditioning on lagged volume substantially attenuates the leverage effect and 4 after conditioning on lagged volume there is a positive risk return relation article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

transactions volume and volatility we show that the positive volatility volume relation documented by numerous researchers actually reflects the positive relation between volatility and the number of transactions thus it is the occurrence of transactions per se and not their size that generates volatility trade size has no information beyond that contained in the frequency of transactions our results suggest that theoretical research needs to entertain scenarios in which 1 both the frequency and size of trades are endogenously determined yet 2 the size of trades has no information content beyond that contained in the number of transactions article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

equilibrium analysis of portfolio insurance a martingale approach is used to characterize general equilibrium in the presence of portfolio insurance insurers sell to noninsurers in bad states and general equilibrium requires that the risk premium rises to induce noninsurers to increase their holdings we show that portfolio insurance increases price volatility causes mean reversion in asset returns raises the sharpe ratio and volatility in bad states and causes volatility to be correlated with volume we also explain why out of the money sp that is the demand for an absolute level of price protection is equivalent to a demand for put options 1 we show that a similar argument can be used in a

instability in cointegration regressions a brief review with an application to money demand in portugal this study addresses some modelling questions related to the possibility of structural change in models with nonstationary variables focusing on cointegration issues some methodological aspects are discussed attempting to integrate coherently the several steps of the modelling strategy these range from unit root to cointegration testing and to testing for instability in the cointegration vector an empirical example with portuguese data tries to illustrate the usefulness of this approach where a simple money demand function is estimated using an error correction model ecm if a break is explicitly allowed in the cointegration vector the forecasting performance of the ecm improves

a model of competitive stock trading volume a model of competitive stock trading is developed in which investors are heterogeneous in their information and private investment opportunities and rationally trade for both informational and noninformational motives i examine the link between the nature of heterogeneity among investors and the behavior of trading volume and its relation to price dynamics it is found that volume is positively correlated with absolute changes in prices and dividends i show that informational trading and noninformational trading lead to different dynamic relations between trading volume and stock returns

differential information and dynamic behavior of stock trading volume this article develops a multiperiod rational expectations model of stock trading in which investors have differential information concerning the underlying value of the stock investors trade competitively in the stock market based on their private information and the information revealed by the market clearing prices as well as other public news we examine how trading volume is related to the information flow in the market and how investors trading reveals their private information article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

applying regret theory to investment choices currency hedging decisions we apply regret theory an axiomatic behavioral theory to derive closed form solutions to optimal currency hedging choices investors experience regret of not having chosen the ex post optimal hedging decision hence investors anticipate their future experience of regret and incorporate it in their objective function we derive a model of financial decision making with two components of risk traditional risk volatility and regret risk we find results that are in sharp contrast with traditional expected utility loss aversion or disappointment aversion theories we discuss the empirical implications of our model and its ability to explain observed hedging behavior

do demand curves for stocks slope down since september 1976 stocks newly included into the standard and poor s 500 index have earned a significant positive abnormal return at the announcement of the inclusion this return does not disappear for at least ten days after the inclusion the returns are positively related to measures of buying by index funds consistent with the hypothesis that demand curves for stocks slope down the returns are not related to s p s bond ratings which is inconsistent with a plausible version of the hypothesis that inclusion is a certification of the quality of the stock

volume volatility and the dispersion of beliefs i examine a two period noisy rational expectations model of a futures market and show that the dispersion of expectations about a weighted average of future prices measures both the additional volatility and the additional expected volume of trade associated with noisy information the role played by dispersion helps clarify several stylized facts concerning volume and price behavior specifically dispersion can be a factor contributing to the positive correlation between volume and absolute price changes and the positive correlation between consecutive absolute price changes article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

trading volume and serial correlation in stock returns this paper investigates the relationship between aggregate stock market trading volume and the serial correlation of daily stock returns for both stock indexes and individual large stocks the first order daily return autocorrelation tends to decline with volume the paper explains this phenomenon using a model in which risk averse market makers accommodate buying or selling pressure from liquidity or noninformational traders changing expected stock returns reward market makers for playing this role the model implies that a stock price decline on a high volume day is more likely than a stock price decline on a low volume day to be associated with an increase in the expected stock return