We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91 thousand investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings. This allows us to characterize investors' heterogeneity in terms of...

We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The remarkably good results have strong implications for theories of asset trade. We find that the geography of information heavily determines the pattern of international...

This paper argues that the globalization of securities markets may promote contagion among investors by weakening incentives for gathering costly country-specific information and by strengthening incentives for imitating arbitrary market portfolios. In the presence of short-selling constraints,...

In this paper we study how volatility in monetary policy affects economic performance in the presence of endogenously chosen information structures. To isolate the effects produced by the interaction of uncertainty in monetary policy and (possibly) asymmetric information, we consider a model in...

During the financial crisis apparently centralized markets continued to function while trade in OTC markets froze. We use search-and-bargaining theory to ascertain conditions that allow trade to temporarily freeze in decentralized markets, focusing on the roles of liquidity and self-fulfilling...

Are market experts prone to heuristics, and if so, do they transfer across closely related domains--buying and selling? We investigate this question using a unique dataset of institutional investors with portfolios averaging $573 million. A striking finding emerges: while there is clear evidence...

The paper documents important differences in payment for order flow (PFOF), spreads, and price improvement across asset classes. In stocks, we show that PFOF is small. While many retail trades are executed off-exchange, we find that they receive meaningful price improvement, particularly when...

We analyze a two-country model of trade in both legitimate and counterfeit products. Domestic firms own trademarks and establish reputations for delivering high-quality products in a steady-state equilibrium. Foreign suppliers export legitimate low-quality merchandise and counterfeits of...

Takeover targets often experience substantial share price appreciations around public announcements of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze hedge fund and mutual fund holdings around takeover announcements to assess the differences in investment strategies across institutions. Our results...