Many seemingly discordant results are reconciled if firm-specific return volatility is characterized as the intensity with which firm-specific events occur. A functionally efficient stock market allocates capital to its highest value uses, which often amounts to financing Schumpeterian creative...

What explains short-term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18th century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and news came in on sailboats that were often...

We re-examine the Fama (1984) puzzle – the finding that ex post depreciation and interest differentials are negatively correlated, contrary to what theory suggests – for eight advanced country exchange rates against the US dollar, over the period up to June 2019. The rejection of the joint...

Stock prices are more informative when the information has less social value. Speculators with limited resources making costly (private) information production decisions must decide to produce information about some firms and not others. We show that producing and trading on private information...

In a capitalist economy prices serve to equilibrate supply and demand for goods and services, continually changing to reallocate resources to their most efficient uses. However, secondary stock market prices, often viewed as the most 'informationally efficient' prices in the economy, have no...

This paper provides a selective survey of the voluminous literature on tests for market efficiency. The ideas discussed include standard autocorrelation tests, multi-period regression tests and volatility tests. The formulation and estimation of models for time-varying volatility are also...

We show that outcomes (parameter estimates and R-squareds) of regressions of prices on fundamentals allow us to recover exact measures of the ability of asset prices to aggregate dispersed information. Formally, we show how to recover absolute and relative price informativeness in dynamic...

In a model where a variable Y[sub t] is proportional to the present value, with constant discount rate, of expected future values of a variable y[sub t] the quot;spreadquot; S[sub t]= Y[sub t] - [theta sub t] will be stationary for some [theta] whether or not y[sub t]must be differenced to...

In this paper, we re-examine the stock market of the 1920s and 1930s for evidence of a bubble, a 'fad' or 'herding' behavior by studying individual stock returns. One story often advanced for the boom of 1928 and 1929 is that it was driven by the entry into the market of largely uninformed...

Equity market liberalizations are like IPOs, but they are IPOs of a country's stock market rather than of individual firms. Both are endogenous events whose benefits are limited by poor investor protection, agency costs, and information asymmetries. As for stock prices following an IPO, there...