I present a simple model in which it is possible that opening a new market makes everybody worse off. Unlike previous examples in the literature, the analysis does not rely on relative price changes of different consumption goods. This is shown in a standard framework in which uninformed traders...

With only minimal restrictions on security payoffs and trader preferences, noisy aggregation of heterogeneous information drives a systematic wedge between the impact of fundamentals on the price of a security, and the corresponding impact on cash flow expectations. From an ex ante perspective,...

We present a model of quantitative trading as an automated system under human supervision. Contrary to previous literature we show that price-contingent trading is the profitable equilibrium strategy of large rational agents in efficient markets. The key ingredient is uncertainty about whether a...

Survey respondents strongly disagree about return risks and, increasingly, macroeconomic uncertainty. This may have contributed to higher asset prices through increased use of collateralisation, which allows risk-neutral investors to realise perceived gains from trade. Investors with lower risk...

Since the early 2000s, the importance of financial literacy for safe financial behaviors has increased in public debate and has been the motivation for several national and international institutions to launch and promote financial education initiatives. Although discussion on the effects of...

We analyse dynamic financial contracting under moral hazard. The ability to rely on future rewards relaxes the tension between incentive and participation constraints, relative to the static case. Managers are incited by the promise of future payments after several successes and the threat of...

Is sovereign debt so different from corporate debt that there is no need for bankruptcy procedures to handle potential defaults? The basic tools of finance seem to confirm that, without water-tight sovereign immunity, creditors face a Prisoner’s Dilemma: litiginous creditors may be tempted to...

This paper documents that at the individual stock level insiders sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders purchases peak only the month before a large jump. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric...

This paper revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit...

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...