We survey the recent literature on learning in financial markets. Our main theme is that many financial market phenomena that appear puzzling at first sight are easier to understand once we recognize that parameters in financial models are uncertain and subject to learning. We discuss phenomena...

Two intermediary-based factors - a broad financial distress measure and a dealer corporate bond inventory measure - explain about 50% of the puzzling common variation of credit spread changes beyond canonical structural factors. A simple model, in which intermediaries facing margin constraints...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

We study information substitutability in the financial market through a quasi-natural experiment: the pandemic-triggered lockdown that has hampered people's physical interactions hence the ability to collect, process, and transmit soft information. Exploiting the cross- sectional and time-series...

We characterize the price-transparency role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can, under conditions, raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers and customers, and reducing search costs. Although the...

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...

Previously, academics have used the supply of information that arrives to market (e.g., macroeconomic announcements, earnings reports, or news releases) to study how information affects asset prices and anomalies, and for tests of market efficiency. In this paper, we instead use measures of...

A new class of Capital Asset Pricing Models (CAPM) arises from the first principle of real investment for individual firms. Conceptually as "causal"' as the consumption CAPM, yet empirically more tractable, the investment CAPM emerges as a leading asset pricing paradigm. Firms do a good job in...