Publications

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December 2005 (Revised July 2006)
Case

What Should the Federal Reserve Do? Thoughts of Greenspan and Bernanke

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Noel Maurer

Presents remarks by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke on monetary policy, explicit inflation targets, and the relative merits of asset price targeting. View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Asset Pricing; Central Banking; Financial Strategy; Policy; Banking Industry

Jonathan Wallen is an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Finance Unit and teaches Finance 1 to MBA students.

Professor Wallen’s research centers on financial intermediation and its intersection with asset pricing, currency markets,... View Details

18 Feb 2019
Working Paper Summaries

Diagnostic Bubbles

Keywords: by Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon, and Andrei Shleifer; Financial Services

1987
Working Paper

Tests of Excess Forecast Volatility in the Foreign Exchange and Stock Markets

By: K. A. Froot

Simple regression tests that have power against the alternatives that asset prices and expected future asset returns are excessively volatile are developed and performed for the foreign exchange and stock markets. These tests have a number of advantages over... View Details

Keywords: Risk Aversion; Risk; International Investing; International Finance; Risk and Uncertainty; Asset Pricing; Financial Markets; Investment; Behavioral Finance; Volatility

August 2001 (Revised April 2002)
Case

Strategic Capital Management, LLC (A)

By: Mark L. Mitchell, Erik Stafford and Todd Pulvino

Strategic Capital Management, LLC, is a hedge fund that is planning to make financial investments in Creative Computers and Ubid. Creative Computers recently sold approximately 20% of its Internet auction subsidiary, Ubid, to the public at $15 per share. Ubid's stock... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Business Subsidiaries; Internet and the Web; Investment Funds; Price; Performance Efficiency; Capital Markets; Auctions; Investment Return; Equity; Planning; Financial Services Industry

2024
Working Paper

What Do Bank Trading Desks Do?

By: Lina Lu and Jonathan Wallen

Bank trading desks earn profits from intermediating customer trading volume. Across a broad set of asset markets, we document that the trading desks of large U.S. dealer banks behave as financial intermediaries that profit from toll-taking as in Duffie et al. (2005).... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Profit; Financial Markets

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Adi Sunderam is the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance at Harvard Business School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Economics department. He teaches Finance 2 in... View Details

Keywords: asset management; asset management; asset management; asset management; asset management; asset management

June 2009
Case

Midland Energy Resources, Inc.: Cost of Capital

By: Timothy A. Luehrman and Joel L. Heilprin

The senior vice president of project finance for a global oil and gas company must determine the weighted average cost of capital for the company as a whole and each of its divisions as part of the annual capital budgeting process. The case uses comparable companies to... View Details

Keywords: Risk Assessment; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Cost of Capital; Cash Flow; Capital Structure; Valuation; Capital Budgeting; Energy Industry

April 2017 (Revised November 2017)
Case

BlackRock (B): Acquire MLIM? (with video links)

By: Ranjay Gulati, Jan W. Rivkin, Stuart C. Gilson and Aldo Sesia

In early 2006, BlackRock, Inc. is considering acquiring Merrill Lynch’s asset management business. The asset management industry was in a state of transition. In the prior year, more than 130 mergers and acquisitions had taken place. The proposed deal between BlackRock... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Competition; Information Technology; Asset Management; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Choices and Conditions; United States

Andi Wang is a doctoral student in the Business Economics program, where he works at the intersection of finance, macro and behavioral economics. He is particularly interested in studying institutional and behavioral frictions that have long-lasting effects on asset... View Details

Research Summary

The Cross Section of Expected Firm (Not Equity) Returns

This paper provides the first comprehensive study of expected firm (unlevered equity) returns. After accounting for the debt component of the firm return, I find that many of the cross sectional determinants of expected equity returns, such as the book-to-market... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Valuing Stocks With Earnings

By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy

We show that commonly used aggregate earnings are several times as volatile as stock prices over the last three decades. Movements in the price-earnings ratio are thus entirely explained by earnings growth and unrelated to future returns. As an alternative to the... View Details

Keywords: Price; Investment Portfolio; Stocks; Behavioral Finance; Accounting

SSRN

07 Jul 2020
Working Paper Summaries

Predictable Financial Crises

Keywords: by Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson, Andrei Shleifer, and Jakob Ahm Sørensen

Research Summary

Analyst Disagreement, Mispricing and Liquidity (with Ronnie Sadka)

We document a close link between mispricing and liquidity by investigating stocks with high analyst disagreement. Previous research finds that these stocks tend to be overpriced, but prices correct down as uncertainty about earnings is resolved. We conjecture that one... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Rise of Alternatives

By: Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang and Emil Siriwardane

Since the 2000s, U.S. public pensions have shifted their risky investments towards alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds, some more aggressively than others. We explore several explanations for these cross-sectional trends, focusing on those implied by... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Investment Return; Risk and Uncertainty

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Article

Investor Sentiment in the Stock Market

By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

We examine how investor sentiment affects the cross-section of stock returns. Theory predicts that a broad wave of sentiment will disproportionately affect stocks whose valuations are highly subjective and are difficult to arbitrage. We test this prediction by... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Stocks; Investment Return; Valuation; Forecasting and Prediction; Volatility; Price; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavioral Finance