While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

I investigate whether or not the multi-period trades of financial institutions cause mispricing in the stock market. After controlling for the magnitude and trends in institutional trades, I find evidence consistent with institutional trades pushing prices away from fundamentals. Stocks heavily...

We studied the effect of the end of Daylight Saving Time (DST) on stock markets around the globe. Using a detailed cross-country daily returns data set we found that (a) market returns on the day following the clock shift were significantly lower than the corresponding day of a week unaffected...

Whether proprietary traders provide or take liquidity, and how their behavior evolves over the business cycle and across stocks, remains at the center of an ongoing debate. Using a unique dataset from the NYSE, we document that proprietary traders concentrate their trades in large and liquid...

We derive closed form expressions for equilibrium asset prices and liquidity in an economy populated by a finite number of large, strategic, risk averse investors. The model allows for arbitrary risk preferences, any number of assets, and an arbitrary distribution of asset payoffs. In...

Investors who use biased information from news media subsequently tend to make irrational decisions about acquiring firm-specific information compared to rational expectations. This model of information acquisition yields testable predictions that are verified by using a novel dataset. First,...

We propose a simple measure of investor sophistication based on financial statement experience derived from publicly available EDGAR log data about accounting information acquisition activity. This approach allows us to provide unique empirical evidence for the existence of attention induced...

We analyze early-venture fundraising from dispersed, endogenously informed investors. An entrepreneur chooses a payoff-maximizing offering, and investors communicate their information by either contributing capital or by abstaining. The entrepreneur uses the information conveyed by fundraising...

We use a proprietary dataset to test the implications of several asymmetric information models on how short-lived private information affects trading strategies and liquidity provision. Our identification rests on information acquisition before analyst recommendations are publically announced....

Amendments to NASD Rule 2711 and NYSE Rule 472, enacted in May 2002, mandate that sell-side analysts disclose the distribution of their security recommendations by category of buy, hold, and sell. This regulation enhances the transparency of analysts' information and mitigates the...