Christopher Hrdlicka PhD Candidate in Finance chrdlicka@chicagobooth.edu CV

	Research Interests
	Trading Volume, Housing and Capital Specificity, Real Estate Finance, Asset Pricing
	Job Market Paper
	"Trading Volume and Time Varying Betas" (January 11, 2010) An investor with higher than average background risk hedges by holding fewer equities exposed to that risk. As the risk exposure of those equities change over time the investor's optimal hedge varies. I model the trading volume generated to maintain the hedge under symmetric information. The pattern of volume predicted matches three stylized facts: volume and absolute price changes are positively correlated; more volume accompanies price increases than price decreases; and higher volume accompanying a price change increases the likelihood of its reversal. I verify three new predictions of my model: volume and beta changes are positively correlated; more volume accompanies beta decreases than beta increases; and the volume response to a beta change decreases with the initial beta level. The sensitivity of turnover to beta changes is economically large. A beta change of one increases annual expected turnover between 50% and 75%.
	Works in Progress
	"The Price and Volume Impact of Housing Specificity: Double Sided Search and Endogenous Market Intensity" The types of and tastes for houses are varied. This variation imposes search costs on buyers and sellers. These costs depend upon the number of market participants, but fixed costs of listing homes makes only a subset available for sale. I endogenize the choice to list and consider the implications of market participants simultaneously acting as a buyer and seller. Compared to standard search models that separate these roles, this double-sided search increases the volatility in transaction prices and volume. Endogenizing listings and match quality shows  transaction data from downturns undervalues the housing stock.
	"Repurchases and their role in disappearing dividends." I find that the substitution of stock repurchases for dividend payments accounts for half of the decline in the propensity to pay dividends documented by Fama and French (2001JFE). This substitution occurs primarily at the bottom of the dividend payer distribution. I document that firms regularly employ repurchases at sub-annual frequencies. This low frequency causes annual cross-sections to understate the prevalence of stock repurchases by approximately one half.