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...

This paper explores liquidity spillovers in market-capitalization-based portfolios of NYSE stocks. Return, volatility, and liquidity dynamics across the small- and large-cap sectors are modeled by way of a vector autoregression model, using data that spans more than 3,000 trading days. We find...

Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

We develop a new likelihood-based approach to signing trades in the absence of quotes. This approach is equally efficient as the existing Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods, but more than ten times faster. It can address the occurrence of multiple trades at the same time and allows for analysis of...

We find that the firms included in the S&P 500 index are characterized by large increases in earnings, appreciation in market value, and positive price momentum in the period preceding their index inclusion. This strong preinclusion performance predicts 1) the permanent increase in market value...

We find, unlike earlier studies, that there is no rise in the market betas of stocks that enter the S&P 500 index when the estimated factor model is that of Fama and French (1993). We also find that SMB and HML factor betas decline after the stocks are added to the index. This decline is...

Does the presence of arbitrageurs decrease equilibrium asset price volatility? I study an economy with arbitrageurs, informed investors, and noise traders. Arbitrageurs face a trade-off between arbitrage and inference: they would like to buy assets in response to temporary price declines (the...

We develop a new methodology to estimate the impact of a financial transaction tax (FTT) on financial market outcomes. In our sequential trading model, there are price-elastic noise and informed traders. We estimate the model through maximum likelihood for a sample of sixty New York Stock...

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 company’s stock price to drop by as much as 76 percent...