We study information substitutability in the financial market through a quasi-natural experiment: the pandemic-triggered lockdown that has hampered people's physical interactions hence the ability to collect, process, and transmit soft information. Exploiting the cross- sectional and time-series...

Motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, we model investors' attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset-price dynamics. We show that limited investor attention leads to ``category-learning" behavior, i.e., investors tend to...

Standard models of informed speculation suggest that traders try to learn information that others do not have. This result implicitly relies on the assumption that speculators have long horizons, i.e, can hold the asset forever. By contrast, we show that if speculators have short horizons, they...

We study how sophisticated investors, when faced with changes in information environment, adjust their information acquisition and trading behavior, and how these changes in turn affect market efficiency. We find that, after exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures of brokerage...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market in completeness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

The abnormal return associated with a stock being added to the S&P 500 has fallen from an average of 3.4% in the 1980s and 7.6% in the 1990s to 0.8% over the past decade. This has occurred despite a significant increase in the percentage of stock market assets linked to the index. A similar...

Savings increasingly flow to low-cost index funds, which simply buy and hold the stocks in a major index, such as the S&P 500. Increased indexing impedes incorporation of idiosyncratic information into stock prices. We limit endogeneity bias by showing that exogenous idiosyncratic currency...

We examine the impacts of ethical declarations on market transactions through a controlled laboratory experiment, where privately-informed sellers issue a public report prior to a first-price auction. We find that while signing an ethical statement does not reduce misreporting by sellers, it...

We review how realistic frictions in information and/or rationality arrest general equilibrium (GE) feedbacks. In one specification, we maintain rational expectations but remove common knowledge of aggregate shocks. In another, we replace rational expectations with Level-k Thinking or a smooth...