The recent volatility of stock prices has caused many people to conclude that investors have become irrational in valuing at least some stocks. This paper investigates the behavior of the volatility of stocks on the Nasdaq, which tend to be smaller companies with more growth options, in relation...

Recent equity carve-outs in US technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 1998-2000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

To understand the extent to which partisan majorities in Congress influence economic policy, we compare financial market responses in recent midterm elections to Presidential elections. We use prediction markets tracking election outcomes as a means of precisely timing and calibrating the...

Samuelson (1998) offered the dictum that the stock market is 'micro efficient' but 'macro inefficient.' That is, the efficient markets hypothesis works much better for individual stocks than it does for the aggregate stock market. In this paper, we present one simple test, based both on...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

We examine some basic data on the evolution of aggregate short interest, both during the dot-com era, and at other times in history. Total short interest moves in a countercyclical fashion. For example, short interest in NASDAQ stocks actually declines as the NASDAQ index approaches its peak....

The monthly volatility of IPO initial returns is substantial, fluctuates dramatically over time, and is considerably larger during "hot" IPO markets. Consistent with IPO theory, the volatility of initial returns is higher among firms whose value is more difficult to estimate, i.e., among firms...

This review paper describes basic auction concepts, and provides a summary of the theory in this area, particularly as it relates to Treasury auctions.