A longstanding controversy in economics and finance is whether financial markets are governed by rational forces or by emotional responses. We study the importance of emotion in the decisionmaking process of professional securities traders by measuring their physiological characteristics, e.g.,...

We provide an introduction to the use of return based style analysis of Sharpe (1992) in practice. We demonstrate the importance of selecting the right style benchmarks and how the use of inappropriate style benchmarks may lead to wrong conclusions. When style analysis is applied to sector...

This paper investigates the motive of option trading. We show that option trading is mostly driven by differences of opinion, a finding different from the current literature that attempts to attribute option trading to information asymmetry. Our conclusion is based on three pieces of empirical...

In the late 1980s, many countries in Africa established national stock exchanges with a view to foster financial development and economic growth. This paper provides a survey and synthesis of the extant literature on the efficiency of African equity markets (AEMs). It explores the path of...

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...

In a market with short term agents and heterogeneous information, when liquidity trading displays persistence, prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors exploit a private learning channel to infer the demand of liquidity traders from the...

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities is often associated with "exuberant" movements in asset prices and real economic activity. During these episodes of high uncertainty, financial markets look at the real sector for signals about the profitability of the new investment...

We describe a new mechanism that explains the transmission of liquidity shocks from one security to another ("liquidity spillovers"). Dealers use prices of other securities as a source of information. As prices of less liquid securities convey less precise information, a drop in liquidity for...

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of trading that takes place in the dark, outside such visible order books. This paper evaluates the impact of dark trading and...