The finance industry has grown. Financial markets have become more liquid. Information technology has improved. But have prices become more informative? Using stock and bond prices to forecast earnings, we find that the information content of market prices has not increased since 1960. The...

Customer order flow correlates with permanent price changes in equity and non-equity markets. We examine macro news events in the thirty-year Treasury futures market to identify causality from customer flow to risk-free rates. We remove the positive feedback trading effect and establish that, in...

In response to the sharp decline in prices of financial stocks in the fall of 2008, regulators in a number of countries banned short selling of particular stocks and industries. Evidence suggests that these bans did little to stop the slide in stock prices, but significantly increased costs of...

This paper examines the impact of large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) on U.S. asset prices (nominal and inflation-indexed bonds, stocks, and U.S. dollar spot exchange rates) using an event study with intraday data. The surprise component of LSAP announcements is identified from Financial Times...

The Capital Assistance Program (CAP) was created by the U.S. government in February 2009 to provide backup capital to large financial institutions unable to raise sufficient capital from private investors. Under the terms of the CAP, a participating bank receives contingent capital by issuing...

We propose two new jump-robust estimators of integrated variance based on high-frequency return observations. These MinRV and MedRV estimators provide an attractive alternative to the prevailing bipower and multipower variation measures. Specifically, the MedRV estimator has better theoretical...

This paper assesses the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market, using newly available tick data from the BrokerTec electronic trading platform. Examining trading activity, bid-ask spreads, and depth for on-the-run two-,three-, five-, ten-, and thirty-year Treasury securities, we...

The proposal for banks to issue contingent capital that must convert into common equity when the banks' stock price falls below a specified threshold, or "trigger," does not in general lead to a unique equilibrium in equity and contingent capital prices. Multiple or no equilibrium arises because...

In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the parent company's stock price to drop by as much as 76...

This paper examines the mechanism through which the incorporation of information into prices leads to cross-autocorrelations in stock returns. The lead-lag relation between large and small stocks increases with lagged spreads of large stocks. Further, order flows in large stocks significantly...