We propose a dynamic asset-market equilibrium model in which (1) an "innovative" asset with as-yet-unknown average payoff is traded, and (2) investors delegate investment to experts. Experts secretly renege on investors' orders and take on leveraged positions in the asset to manipulate...

We analyze a dynamic model of informed trading where a shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to change the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the shareholder, because the level of effort...

This study quantifies the presence of financial distress in the cross section of stock returns. Systemic risk is defined as the occurrence of simultaneous tail events for a large fraction of firms. A tail event is interpreted as evidence of downside risk in the tail distribution of financial...

This paper analyzes the role of passive blockholders in corporate governance using data on Schedule 13G filings. We show that firm value increases with the number and aggregate ownership of passive blockholders after controlling for other possible determinants of firm value. More importantly, we...

This paper tests whether mutual funds on aggregate matter for the equilibrium stock returns due to (i) uncertain fund flows, which directly affect fund size and managers' income; and (ii) time-varying liquidity costs of assets. I find the aggregate shocks to fund flows enter the pricing kernel in...

Trust companies generate leverage cycle dynamics by intermediating less regulated credit to the financial markets in China. We find that the leverage factor constructed from trust companies can explain the time-series and cross-sectional asset returns. The leverage factor derived from securities...

We study information acquisition in dealer markets. We first identify a one-sided strategic complementarity in information acquisition: the more informed traders are, the larger market makers' gain from becoming informed. When quotes are observable, this effect in turn induces a strategic...

We study how high-frequency traders (HFTs) strategically decide their speed level in a market with a random speed bump. If HFTs recognize the market impact of their speed decision, they perceive a wider bid-ask spread as an endogenous upward-sloping cost of being faster. We find that the speed...

I argue that arbitrage mistranslates factor information from ETFs to constituent securities and distorts comovement. The intuition behind this distortion is arbitrageurs trade constituent securities not based on their fundamental exposures but by their portfolio weights, causing securities to...

This paper documents a new high risk-low return puzzle. Specfically, we find that a forward-looking risk measure extracted from credit line undrawn spreads negatively predicts borrowers' future stock returns. This negative risk-return relation is separate from previously documented asset pricing...