We decompose the structural estimate of the probability of informed trading, PIN, into components that capture informed trading on good and on bad news. We estimate these two components at quarterly intervals, and provide new evidence that they capture informed trading around earnings...

This paper analyzes the Amihud (2002) measure of illiquidity and its role in asset pricing. It is shown first that the effect of illiquidity on asset pricing is clarified by using the turnover version of the Amihud measure and including firm size as a separate variable. When we decompose the...

In this paper we provide new evidence that corporate financing decisions are associated with managerial incentives to report high equity earnings. Managers rely most heavily on debt to finance their asset growth when their future earnings prospects are poor, when they are under pressure due to...

We use a model of stock price behavior in which the expected rate of return on stocks follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to show that levels of return predictability that cause large variation in valuation ratios and offer significant benefits to dynamic portfolio strategies are hard to...

We offer evidence of a new stylized feature of corporate financing decisions: the tendency of managers to rely more on debt financing when earnings prospects are poor. We term this 'leaning against the wind' and consider three possible explanations: market timing, precautionary financing, and...

We offer evidence of a new stylized feature of corporate financing decisions: the tendency of managers to rely more on debt financing when earnings prospects are poor. We term this 'leaning against the wind' and consider three possible explanations: market timing, precautionary financing, and...

In this paper we present new empirical evidence on the agency based asset pricing model of Brennan (1993). We find strong evidence that in the recent period stocks whose returns covary more with the idiosyncratic component of the Samp;P500 return have significantly lower returns, holding...