"This paper looks at the role of both commercial and investment banks in providing merger advisory services. In this area, unlike some areas of investment banking, commercial banks have always been allowed to compete directly with investment banks. In their dual role as lenders and advisors to...

We examine 120 Nasdaq and Over-the-Counter "buy" recommendations made by Internet sites from April 1999 to June 2001. The stock picks show substantial short- and long-run price and liquidity gains, although no new information is revealed about them. For example, liquidity one year after the pick...

In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that the chief executive officers of large, publicly traded firms certify the accuracy of their company financial statements. In this paper, I investigate whether CEO certification has had a measurable effect on the stock market valuation...

Does the presence of arbitrageurs decrease equilibrium asset price volatility? I study an economy with arbitrageurs, informed investors, and noise traders. Arbitrageurs face a trade-off between arbitrage and inference: they would like to buy assets in response to temporary price declines (the...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a "bubble," or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...