Risk and Return around the Clock

We investigate price discovery over the 24-hour trading day for equities, currencies, bonds, and commodities. Sizable price discovery occurs around the clock for most assets. For a given asset, intraday risk and return distributions are fairly similar, indicating a broadly constant risk-return-relationship during the day. Although the amount of price discovery varies significantly during the day and differs across assets, price discovery is generally efficient around the clock. Most assets do not exhibit the U-shaped intraday volatility pattern that has been documented for US equities, even if only main trading hours are considered. Intraday spikes in volatility are driven by the open or close of the market for the respective asset or other assets and by macroeconomic announcements. Both diffusion and jump risk are important drivers of intraday volatility patterns, and US macroeconomic news account for a sizable fraction of jump-driven volatility. For some -- but not all -- assets, the relationship between volume and volatility that can generally be observed during the trading day does not hold at the time of jumps, suggesting that traders anticipate large price moves at the time of scheduled announcements and market depth falls accordingly

Interest Rates, Bounded Rationality, and Complexity: Demand and Supply of Retail Financial Products

We study the post-Great Recession market for retail investment products. With an experiment, we show that low interest rates drive investment demand but not product differentiation. Elicited margins go hand in hand with investors' underestimation of complex risk exposures. We empirically document that (i) rising complexity follows market growth, (ii) issuer margins increase in complexity, and (iii) simpler products first-order dominate more-complex products. Furthermore, biased dependency perceptions predict margins in the cross-section. Consistent with limited buy-side learning and growing sell-side competition, banks employ strategic price complexity to mitigate competitive pressure. Our findings showcase how low interest rates fuel excessive risk-taking