Low-Risk Anomalies?

This paper shows that low-risk anomalies in the capital asset pricing model and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option-implied ex ante skewness is strongly related to ex post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct coskewness factor-mimicking portfolios. Controlling for skewness renders the alphas of betting-against-beta and betting-against-volatility insignificant. We also show that the returns of beta- and volatility-sorted portfolios are driven largely by a single principal component, which in turn is explained largely by skewness.     

Accounting for the Business of Suffering: A Study of the Antebellum Richmond, Virginia, Slave Trade

When the Congress barred the importation of slaves into the United States in 1808, it left the internal slave trade intact. The trade took on a new importance as the slave states of the Old South saw their agricultural economies shift to a point that holding large numbers of slaves became too expensive. During this time, the large agricultural concerns shifted to the New South, where cotton and sugar plantations needed the cheap labour provided by the institution of slavery. As this transition intensified, Richmond, Virginia, became a central slave market that facilitated the interstate slave trade as Old South planters chose the course of selling slaves as a valuable commodity rather than the course of manumission. The records of two businesses—Dickinson & Hill and Hector Davis & Company—which plied the slave trade in the Richmond market, have survived into the twenty-first century. These records revealed a primitive, yet sophisticated, process to account for the consignment, purchase, and sales of human merchandise in this haunting story of the 'business of suffering'.     

The rise and decline of European parliaments, 1188–17891

This article quantifies the activities of medieval and early modern parliaments. It traces the long‐term evolution of this European institution, and offers a first pass at analysing its impact on long‐term economic development. Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin west between 1200 and 1500. In the early modern period, parliaments declined in influence in southern and central Europe and further gained in importance in the Netherlands and Britain, resulting in an institutional ‘Little Divergence’ between 1500 and 1800. We discuss the background of this phenomenon in detail. Moreover, by analysing the effects of parliamentary activity on city growth we find that these differences in institutional development help to explain the economic divergence between north‐western and southern and central Europe.     

传统组景序列调查反映的中国古代游憩偏好

中国古代的大量组景序列实例提供了研究中国古代游憩偏好和游憩行为的大量史料.本研究已收集200套组景序列案例,包括中国、日本的实景以及绘画实例.其中已有明确定位的142组中国实景实例,分布在与北宋疆域大致相符的范围内.本研究采用随机选出的100套组景序列共812个单独景观进行分析,显示出自然景现在中国古代游憩欣赏中所占的重要比重,同时表明了中国传统游憩偏好不同于西方的几点特性.     

Bargaining over Public Goods

In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure, the equilibria of which converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the public good. Since this procedure does not assume price-taking behavior, it provides a strategic foundation for the personalized taxes inherent in the Lindahl solution to the public goods problem.     

A Rational Expectations Equilibrium with Informative Trading Volume

A large number of empirical studies find that trading volume contains information about the distribution of future returns. While these studies indicate that observing volume is helpful to an outside observer of the economy it is not clear how investors within the economy can learn from trading volume. In this paper, I show how trading volume helps investors to evaluate the precision of the aggregate information in the price. I construct a model that offers a closed‐form solution of a rational expectations equilibrium where all investors learn from (1) private signals, (2) the market price, and (3) aggregate trading volume.     

In Search of Distress Risk

This paper explores the determinants of corporate failure and the pricing of financially distressed stocks whose failure probability, estimated from a dynamic logit model using accounting and market variables, is high. Since 1981, financially distressed stocks have delivered anomalously low returns. They have lower returns but much higher standard deviations, market betas, and loadings on value and small‐cap risk factors than stocks with low failure risk. These patterns are more pronounced for stocks with possible informational or arbitrage‐related frictions. They are inconsistent with the conjecture that the value and size effects are compensation for the risk of financial distress.