Some investors (insiders) observe prices in real-time whereas other investors (outsiders) observe prices with a delay. As prices are informative about the asset payoff, insiders get a strictly larger expected utility than outsiders. Yet, information acquisition by one investor exerts a negative...

This Paper argues that the backbone of the pre-1914 international financial architecture was the concern about moral hazard. No decentralized system can leave without safeguards against free riding and this typically means that problem countries must find by themselves the means to fix their...

In this article, we use the original ledgers of the Bank of England to document which institutions received liquidity during the crisis of 1866. The so-called Overend-Gurney panic is when the Bank began adopting lending of last resort policies (Bignon, Flandreau and Ugolini 2011). We compare...

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New York market during the period leading to the interwar debt...

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model. We show that prices are farther away from (closer to) fundamentals compared with average expectations if and only if traders over- (under-) rely on public...

We study IPOs by focusing on the degree of portfolio diversification of the shareholders taking the company public. We argue that a less diversified shareholder has more to gain from taking the company public and would be more willing to accept a lower price for the sale of its shares, i.e....

We study how competition in the mutual fund industry affects stock market liquidity. We argue that mutual fund families operate as multi-product firms, jointly choosing fees, performance and number of funds and sharing common research facilities. The family-based organization generates economies...

We study the puzzle of portfolio underdiversification and proximity investment from a novel perspective, linking it to the process of urbanization. We find that urban portfolios are more focused – i.e., less diversified and more concentrated in ‘close’ stocks. We explain it in terms of the...