The market dynamics of technology stocks in the late nineties has stimulated a growing body of theories that analyze the joint effects of short-sales constraints and heterogeneous beliefs on stock prices and trading volume. This paper examines implications of these theories using a unique data...

There have been enormous differences of opinion between U.S. and Japanese institutional investors about the outlook for stock prices, differences across the two countries in average one-year-ahead forecasts for the Japanese stock market as great as twenty percentage points. In the past two years...

Heightened counterparty risk during the recent financial crisis has raised questions about the role clearinghouses play in global financial stability. Empirical identification of the effect of centralized clearing on counterparty risk is challenging because of the co-incidence of macro-economic...

We analyze cross-sectional and time series information from forty-seven equity markets around the world, to consider whether short-sales restrictions affect the efficiency of the market, and the distributional characteristics of returns to individual stocks and market indices. Using the approach...

Using over eight trillion observations of market data, we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze the effect of increasing the minimum price variation (MPV) for quoting equity securities in light of recent proposals to increase the MPV from $0.01 to $0.05. We show that a larger MPV...

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when choosing how much to invest in a risky asset, failing to fully take into account what prices convey about others' private information. Cursed traders put more weight on their private signals than rational traders. But...

The short ratio - shares shorted to shares outstanding - is an oft-used measure of arbitrageurs' opinion about a stock's over-valuation. We show that days-to-cover (DTC), which divides a stock's short ratio by its average daily share turnover, is a more theoretically well-motivated measure...

In a model with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria we add trade in assets that pay based on the realization of a sunspot. Asset trading restricts the equilibrium set in a way that raises welfare by eliminating equilibria with a high likelihood of disasters. When the probability of a disaster is...

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...