The Cost of Short‐Selling Liquid Securities

Standard models of liquidity argue that the higher price for a liquid security reflects the future benefits that long investors expect to receive. We show that short‐sellers can also pay a net liquidity premium if their cost to borrow the security is higher than the price premium they collect from selling it. We provide a model‐free decomposition of the price premium for liquid securities into the net premiums paid by both long investors and short‐sellers. Empirically, we find that short‐sellers were responsible for a substantial fraction of the liquidity premium for on‐the‐run Treasuries from November 1995 through July 2009.     

How Do Anticipated Changes to Short‐Term Market Rates Influence Banks' Retail Interest Rates? Evidence from the Four Major Euro Area Economies

In this paper, we argue that banks anticipate short‐term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits. In order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model, we use two methods to forecast market rates—a level, slope, curvature model, and a principal components model—before including them in a model of retail rate adjustment for four retail rates in four major euro area economies. Using both aggregate data and data from individual French banks, we find a significant role for forecasts of market rates in determining retail rates; alternative specifications with futures information yield comparable results.     

Corporate Yield Spreads: Default Risk or Liquidity? New Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market

We use the information in credit default swaps to obtain direct measures of the size of the default and nondefault components in corporate spreads. We find that the majority of the corporate spread is due to default risk. This result holds for all rating categories and is robust to the definition of the riskless curve. We also find that the nondefault component is time varying and strongly related to measures of bond‐specific illiquidity as well as to macroeconomic measures of bond market liquidity.     

Disagreement and Learning: Dynamic Patterns of Trade

The empirical evidence on investor disagreement and trading volume is difficult to reconcile in standard rational expectations models. We develop a dynamic model in which investors disagree about the interpretation of public information. We obtain a closed‐form linear equilibrium that allows us to study which restrictions on the disagreement process yield empirically observed volume and return dynamics. We show that when investors have infrequent but major disagreements, there is positive autocorrelation in volume and positive correlation between volume and volatility. We also derive novel empirical predictions that relate the degree and frequency of disagreement to volume and volatility dynamics.     

Uncertainty, Real Options, and Cost Behavior: Evidence from Washington State Hospitals

This study tests an implication of the real‐options theory of investment, that uncertainty leads firms to prefer technologies with low fixed and high variable costs. In 1983, a change in Medicare reimbursement increased the uncertainty of revenues for hospitals. Using a sample of 831 departments in 59 Washington State hospitals over the 1977–1994 period, we find that the ratio of variable to total costs increased after 1983. This increase is not attributable to a gradual increase in the ratio over time: We estimate a significant increase after 1983 even after controlling for a time trend. Further, we find a greater increase in the variable‐to‐total cost ratio for hospitals that had higher percentages of Medicare patients, increasing our confidence in the conclusion that the change in cost behavior is attributable to Medicare's change in reimbursement.     

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Customer Markets

We present a model in which some goods trade in “customer markets” and advertising facilitates long‐lived relationships. We estimate the model on U.S. data and find a large congestion externality in the pricing of customer market goods. This motivates the analysis of optimal policy. Under a complete set of taxes, fiscal policy eliminates the externalities with large adjustments in tax rates on customer markets goods, while labor tax volatility remains low. Constraining the instruments to the interest rate and labor tax, the optimal labor tax displays large and procyclical fluctuations, but monetary policy is little changed compared to a model with no customer markets.