We study the determinants of private benefits of control in negotiated block transactions. We estimate the block pricing model in Burkart, Gromb, and Panunzi (2000) explicitly accounting for both block premia and block discounts in the data. The evidence suggests that the occurrence of a block...

Note: A substantially revised version of this paper has been published as CEPR DP7358, "Quantifying private benefits of control from a structural model of block trades." Please refer to DP7358 for the most up-to-date version. We study the determinants of private benefits of control in negotiated...

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...

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2009 presidential elections in the United States is widely credited to his personal charisma and his extraordinary rhetorical powers, as revealed throughout the campaign. President Obama was inaugurated in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country,...

We analyze how changes in government policy affect stock prices. Our general equilibrium model features uncertainty about government policy and a government that has both economic and non-economic motives. The government tends to change its policy after performance downturns in the private...

Aggregate stock market returns display negative skewness. Firm-level stock returns display positive skewness. The large literature that tries to explain the first stylized fact ignores the second. This paper provides a unified theory that reconciles the two facts. I build a stationary asset...

This paper analyzes the asset pricing implications of periodic cash payouts within the context of a stationary rational expectations model with heterogeneous investors. The periodicity of cash payouts provides a natural motivation for time-varying conditional volatility in stock returns. I show...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Most stock exchange regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-2009 crisis by imposing bans or regulatory constraints on short-selling. Short-selling restrictions were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often applied to different sets of stocks and featured...