When companies raise equity finance they have to make two choices: the issuing method (cash versus rights) and, when they choose the rights issue method, whether rights should be traded or not. We study these choices using a sample of 15,751 rights issues and 22,016 cash offers announced during...

We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...

We examine the dynamic ownership structure of corporate bonds after initial issuance. We find that as bonds “season”, the market learns more about them. This learning leads to less concentrated bond ownership over time. Specifically, learning induces a shift in bond ownership from more...

We study the link between informed trading and co-movement in illiquidity. We argue that investors concerned with liquidity and fire-sale shocks respond to an increase in informed trading by shifting their portfolios away from stocks with high information asymmetry. This rebalancing causes a...

We study empirically whether short selling deters the incorporation of positive information. We find a sizeable reduction of positive information impounding before earnings announcements for stocks more exposed to short selling. The price pressure from short selling cannot explain this effect....

Positive return correlation signals slowly-diffusing information. Short sell-constrained institutions are mainly informed in their buy trades. Building on these facts, we identify informed investors ex ante by focusing on mutual funds. We propose a measure of the dynamic excess autocorrelation...

In this paper, we estimate the behavioral component of the Grinblatt and Han (2002) model and derive several testable implications about the expected relationship between the preponderance of disposition-prone investors in a market and volume, volatility and stock returns. To do this, we use a...