Using a novel and unique dataset from Norway, we analyze whether professional proximity is associated with asymmetric information and abnormal returns. We find that individuals hold an excess weight in stocks that are professionally close. For example, after excluding holdings of own-company and...

This paper documents that at the individual stock level insiders sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders purchases peak only the month before a large jump. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric...

This paper evaluates the welfare implications of front-running by mutual fund managers. It extends the model of Kyle (1985) to a situation in which the insider with fundamentals-information competes against an insider with trade-information and in which noise trading is endogenized. Noise...

We study holdings in M&A targets by financial conglomerates which affiliated investment banks advise the bidders. We show that advisors take positions in the targets before M&A announcements. These stakes are positively related to the probability of observing the bid and to the target premium....

Fundamental information resembles in many respects a durable good. Hence, the effects of its incorporation into stock prices depend on who is the agent controlling its flow. Similarly to a durable goods monopolist, a monopolistic analyst selling information intertemporally competes against...

We study a two-stage sequential search model with two agents who compete for one job. The agents arrive sequentially, each one in a different stage. The agents' abilities are private information and they are derived from heterogeneous distribution functions. In each stage the designer chooses an...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payo¤s, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks’ ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower’s default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these informational...