This paper documents that underpriced firms substitute R&D spending with share buybacks to the detriment of innovation. To identify underpriced firms, I introduce a novel measure of non-fundamental price pressure induced by indirect exposure to industry-level shocks. This measure addresses...

We propose a technique to avoid spurious detections of jumps in high-frequency data via an explicit thresholding on available test statistics. We prove that it eliminates asymptotically all spurious detections. Monte Carlo results show that it performs also well in finite samples. In Dow Jones...

This paper empirically analyses the effect of foreign block acquisitions on the U.S. target firms' credit risk as captured by their CDS. The involvement of foreign investors leads to a significant increase in the target firms' CDS spreads. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are...

This paper investigates whether news suggestive of irrationality within financial markets have an impact on stock returns. We construct a lexicon of words for 'market irrationality' and score daily news articles based on the number and proportion of words they contain from the lexicon. We find...

Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

I study short-sale constraints in a market with asymmetric information. I offer a novel approach endogenizing short-sale constraints by including an asset-borrowing market in my model. Short-sellers have to borrow an asset and therefore reveal information to a lender. The lender trades on her...

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

Large investors often advertise private information at private talks or in the media. To analyse the incentives for information disclosure, I develop a two-period Kyle (1985) type model in which an informed short-horizon investor strategically discloses private information to enhance price...

We find that single-name options trading increases the absolute level of information content of prices (stock price informativeness). We confirm our results through instrumental variable approach to control for potential endogeneity. We further show causality by using a difference-in-difference...

In this study, we examine the rationale that informed traders use in choosing various financial instruments in order to speculate on the volatility of the underlying asset, here a common stock. Using a continuous-time trading model, we demonstrate that the quality of the private information...