We identify a group of "suspicious" firms that use stock splits--perhaps, along with other activities--to artificially inflate their share prices. Following the initiation of suspicious splits, share prices temporarily increase, and subsequently decline below their pre-split levels. Using...

Takeover targets often experience substantial share price appreciations around public announcements of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze hedge fund and mutual fund holdings around takeover announcements to assess the differences in investment strategies across institutions. Our results...

Prior experimental and empirical research documents that many investors have a lower propensity to sell those stocks on which they have a capital loss. This behavioral phenomenon, known as 'the disposition effect,' has implications for equilibrium prices. We investigate the temporal pattern of...

We provide a model of closed-end fund pricing which includes investors who do not form expectations correctly and allows for salient country-specific news to affect this expectation formation process. We use panel data on prices and net asset values of closed- end country funds to examine...

The paper reviews the evidence on the macroeconomic announcement premium and its implications on equilibrium asset pricing models. Empirically, a large fraction of the equity market risk premium is realized on a small number of trading days with significant macroeconomic announcements. We review...

We study strategic disclosure timing by correlated firms in the presence of risk-averse investors. Firms delay disclosures in the hope that positively correlated firms will announce especially good news and lift their own price. Risk premia rise before disclosures, drop when disclosures occur,...

We propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices. The theory predicts that when investors place higher valuations on low-price firms, managers will maintain share prices at lower levels, and vice-versa. Using measures of time-varying catering incentives based on valuation ratios,...

We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91 thousand investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings. This allows us to characterize investors' heterogeneity in terms of...

Are market experts prone to heuristics, and if so, do they transfer across closely related domains--buying and selling? We investigate this question using a unique dataset of institutional investors with portfolios averaging $573 million. A striking finding emerges: while there is clear evidence...

We analyze a two-country model of trade in both legitimate and counterfeit products. Domestic firms own trademarks and establish reputations for delivering high-quality products in a steady-state equilibrium. Foreign suppliers export legitimate low-quality merchandise and counterfeits of...