We analyze a model of informed trading where an activist shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to increase the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the activist, because the level of effort...

We extend Kyle's (1985) model of insider trading to the case where liquidity provided by noise traders follows a general stochastic process. Even though the level of noise trading volatility is observable, in equilibrium, measured price impact is stochastic. If noise trading volatility is...

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of asset pricing in which profitable informed trading can occur without any "noise" added to the model. It shows that models of profitable informed trading must restrict the portfolio choices of uninformed traders: in particular, they cannot...

In efficient markets the price should reflect the arrival of private information. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is arbitrage. A privately informed trader will engage in costly arbitrage, that is, trade on his knowledge that the price of an asset is different from the fundamental...

The claim that financial markets are efficient is backed by an implicit argument that misinformed "noise traders" can have little influence on asset prices in equilibrium. If noise traders' beliefs are sufficiently different from those of rational agents to significantly affect prices, then...

Using a comprehensive sample of trades by Schedule 13D filers, who possess valuable private information when they accumulate stocks of targeted companies, this paper studies whether several liquidity measures reveal the presence of informed trading. The evidence suggests that when Schedule 13D...

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxes on equity pricing. Examining three-day cumulative abnormal returns for quarterly earning announcements from 1983-1997, we present evidence consistent with shareholders' capital gains taxes affecting stock price responses. To our knowledge,...

This paper defines an intertemporal tax discontinuity (ITD) as a circumstance in which different tax rates are applied to gains and losses realized at one point in time versus some other point in time, and studies the effects of ITDs on market behaviors at the time of disclosures of firm...

Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around macroeconomic news and monetary policy announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and latent factors, reflecting other...

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...