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...

Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...

We study how beliefs about firm value respond to public information stemming from either public announcements or shareholder meetings. We focus on settings with homogeneous shareholders (i.e., agents with common preferences and opinions), where information is about which course of action is best...

Behavioral finance models imply that an increase in shares outstanding leads to a lower stock price for firms with greater diversity in opinion among investors. Information asymmetry models imply that share issues by firms with greater information asymmetries are accompanied by larger share...

This paper studies the bidding behavior of firms in U.S. Forest Service timber auctions in 1976--1990. When conducting timber auctions, the Forest Service publicly announces its estimates of the tract characteristics before the auction, and each bidder additionally has an opportunity to inspect...

As illustrated in the tale of "the dog that did not bark," the absence of news and the passage of time often contain information. We test whether markets fully incorporate this information using the empirical context of mergers. During the year after merger announcement, the passage of time is...

Does information asymmetry affect the cross-section of expected stock returns? We explore this question using representative portfolio holdings data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We show that institutional investors have a strong information advantage, and that past aggressiveness of...

Conventional wisdom holds that the enactment of federal deposit insurance helped small rural banks at the expense of large urban institutions. This paper uses asymmetric information, agency-cost paradigms from corporate finance theory and data on bank stock prices to show how deposit insurance...

When is record-keeping better arranged through a blockchain than through a traditional centralized intermediary? The ideal qualities of any record-keeping system are (i) correctness, (ii) decentralization, and (iii) cost efficiency. We point out a blockchain trilemma: no ledger can satisfy all...

Liquidity management is key in industries with variable cash flows. We study how businesses in the highway construction industry manage cash flow by strategically bidding more on work with an earlier payout--a practice known as front-end loading. We find that small contractors, infrequent...