We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don’t know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms....

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

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 revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit...

Public information in financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information. When the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with...

We analyse the effects of insider trading on real investment and welfare, and the consequences of different regulatory policies: a disclose-or-abstain rule, ‘fair’ disclosure, laissez-faire and forbidding insider trades based on ‘precise’ information. We perform the analysis in a model...

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...

The paper analyses the effects of strategic behaviour by an insider in a price discovery process, akin to an information tâtonnement, in the presence of a competitive informed sector. Such processes are used in the pre-opening period of continuous trading systems in several exchanges. It is...

We analyse dynamic financial contracting under moral hazard. The ability to rely on future rewards relaxes the tension between incentive and participation constraints, relative to the static case. Managers are incited by the promise of future payments after several successes and the threat of...

I present a simple model in which it is possible that opening a new market makes everybody worse off. Unlike previous examples in the literature, the analysis does not rely on relative price changes of different consumption goods. This is shown in a standard framework in which uninformed traders...