We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

This Paper studies predatory trading: trading that induces and/or exploits other investors’ need to reduce their positions. We show that if one trader needs to sell, others also sell and subsequently buy back the asset. This leads to price overshooting and a reduced liquidation value for the...

The dangers of shouting ``fire'' in a crowded theater are well understood, but the dangers of rushing to the exit in the financial markets are more complex. Yet, the two events share several features, and I analyze why people crowd into theaters and trades, why they run, what determines the...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic economy in which the agents are privately informed about their skills, which evolve stochastically over time in an arbitrary fashion. We consider an asset pricing equilibrium in which equilibrium quantities are constrained Pareto optimal. Under the assumption...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information that is useful for predicting future earnings, but is unrelated to current earnings. This...

The paper examines whether or not the convergence process of European economies towards Economic and Monetary Union has led to increased integration of European stock markets. We estimate a conditional asset pricing model, which allows for a time-varying degree of integration that measures the...

This Paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share prices...

Public information in financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information. When the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with...

This paper simplifies Merton’s (1973) fund separation theorem by showing that investors will hold hedge funds in their optimal portfolio only to hedge against changes in the slope or position of the instantaneous capital market line. This result allows for incomplete markets and does not...