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...

The spectacular failure of top-rated structured finance products has brought renewed attention to the conflicts of interest of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs). We model both the CRA conflict of understating credit risk to attract more business, and the issuer conflict of purchasing only the most...

We analyse credit market equilibrium when banks screen loan applicants. When banks have a convex cost function of screening, a pure strategy equilibrium exists where banks optimally set interest rates at the same level as their competitors. This result complements Broecker’s (1990) analysis,...

The collapse of so many AAA-rated structured finance products in 2007-2008 has brought renewed attention to the causes of ratings failures and the conflicts of interest in the Credit Ratings Industry. We provide a model of competition among Credit Ratings Agencies (CRAs) in which there are three...

In this paper we explore the mechanisms that allow securities analysts to value companies in contexts of Knightian uncertainty, that is, in the face of information that is unclear, subject to unforeseeable contingencies or to multiple interpretations. We address this question with a...

We study a novel class of noisy rational expectations equilibria in markets with large number of agents. We show that, as long as noise increases with the number of agents in the economy, the limiting competitive equilibrium is well-defined and leads to non-trivial information acquisition,...

This paper analyzes the choice between limit and market orders in an imperfectly competitive noisy rational expectations economy. There is a unique insider, who takes into account the effect their trading has on prices. If the insider behaves as a price taker, she will choose market orders if...

A speculative security is an asset whose payoff depends on a random shock uncorrelated with economic fundamentals (a sunspot) about which some traders have superior information. In this paper we show that agents may find it desirable to trade such a security in spite of the fact that it is a...

\documentstyle[portada,11pt]{article} This paper shows that the presence of private information in an economy can be a source of market incompleteness even when it is feasible to issue a set of securities that completely eliminates the informational asymmetries in equilibrium. We analyze a...

The paper analyzes the effects of strategic behavior by an insider in a price discovery process, akin to an information tatonnement, in the presence of a competitive informed sector. Such processes are used in the preopening period of continuous trading systems in several exchanges. It is found...