This paper develops a tractable real options framework to analyze the effects of asymmetric information on investment and financing decisions when firms require external funds to finance investment. Our analysis shows that corporate insiders can signal their private information to outside...

We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on corporate bond ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs). We find no evidence that Dodd-Frank disciplines CRAs to provide more accurate and informative credit ratings. Instead, following...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...

We use a model with agency frictions to analyze the structure of a dealer market that faces competition from a crossing network. Traders are privately informed about their types (e.g. their portfolios), which is something the dealer must take into account when engaging his counterparties....

In recent years the market for asset backed securities (ABS) has shown a rapid growth. In an ABS transaction assets are first pooled and then securities backed by this pool are issued. In many cases, several tranches of securities differing with respect to their priority of payment are designed....

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

This paper explores commonalities across asset pricing anomalies. In particular, we assess implications of financial distress for the profitability of anomaly-based trading strategies. Strategies based on price momentum, earnings momentum, credit risk, dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility, and...

This paper studies international equity markets when some investors have private information that is valuable for trading in many countries simultaneously. We use a dynamic model of equity trading to show that 'global' private information helps understand US investors’ trading behaviour and...

This paper reconsiders the role of foreign investors in developed country equity markets. It presents a quantitative model of trading that is built around two new assumptions about investor sophistication: (i) both the foreign and domestic populations contain investors with superior information...

Recent takeover activity has been characterized by broader participation in acquiror financing on both debt and equity sides. We focus on private equity buyouts, and investigate whether the number of financing participants is related to the likelihood of insider trading prior to the bid...