Whether proprietary traders provide or take liquidity, and how their behavior evolves over the business cycle and across stocks, remains at the center of an ongoing debate. Using a unique dataset from the NYSE, we document that proprietary traders concentrate their trades in large and liquid...

Firms significantly reduce their investment in response to non-fundamental drops in the stock price of their product-market peers. We argue that this result arises because of managers' limited ability to filter out the noise in stock prices when using them as signals about their investment...

We show that product differentiation reduces the informativeness of a firm's stock price (or its peers' stock prices) about the value of its growth opportunities. This results in less efficient exercise of a firm's growth options when managers rely on information in stock prices for their...