A central question in financial economics is how private information is incorporated into asset prices. A common method of measuring private information is the PIN measure, which uses statistical estimation of a sequential trade model of the trading process to estimate the probability of...

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...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

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 propose a reduced form model for the Minskian dynamics of liquidity and of asset prices in terms of the so-called financial accelerator mechanism. In a nutshell, credit creation is driven by the market value of the financial assets employed as collateral in the bank loans. This leads to a...

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...

Identifying unambiguously the presence of a bubble in an asset price remains an unsolved problem in standard econometric and financial economic approaches. A large part of the problem is that the fundamental value of an asset is, in general, not directly observable and it is poorly constrained...

The Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of rational expectation bubbles with finite-time singular crash hazard rates has been developed to describe the dynamics of financial bubbles and crashes. It has been applied successfully to a large variety of financial bubbles in many different markets....

We present an extension of the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model to include an additional pricing factor called the “Zipf factor”, which describes the diversification risk of the stock market portfolio. Keeping all the dynamical characteristics of a bubble described in the JLS model, the...

Bailing out banks requires overcoming debt overhang as well as dealing with adverse selection with respect to the quality of banks' balance sheets, in terms of heterogeneity in both the likelihood and extent of their potential shortfalls, of future asset values vis-à-vis contractual debt...