The asymmetry in price pressure from seller vs. buyer-initiated transactions is identified as valuable measure of downside liquidity for corporate bonds. While the evidence of illiquidity on risk premium in the cross-section of corporate bonds is mixed, the aggregate liquidity asymmetry has a...

Countercyclical dispersion of firm outcomes (micro dispersion) is commonly used as a proxy for micro uncertainty. In this paper, we characterize conditions under which micro dispersion and micro uncertainty co-move positively in the context of a large Cournot economy with dispersed information...

This paper develops a novel approach to information-based securities trading by characterizing the hidden state of the market, which varies following a Markov process. Extensive simulation demonstrates that the approach can successfully identify market states and generate measures of...

We show that the post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is stronger for conglomerates thansingle-segment firms. Conglomerates, on average, are larger than single segment firms, so it isunlikely that limits-to-arbitrage drive the difference in PEAD. Rather, we hypothesize that marketparticipants...

We develop a new method to estimate private equity funds' market beta from cash flows. Our methodology extends the widely known public market equivalent calculation to a cross-sectional regression. By simply regressing funds' internal rates of return on their paired market internal rates of...

I test the predictions of a new asset pricing model regarding the interaction of ex-ante return skewness and the dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts on a sample of U.S. stocks. I present evidence that skewness and forecast dispersion have an interactive pricing impact, that forecast...

If investors are differently informed about the payoff of market-traded securities, then the traditional market portfolio is not a relevant benchmark for testing the CAPM. Each investor appraises expected returns and builds his optimal portfolio conditionally on his information. Which proxy to...

I develop a new asset pricing theory that bridges two seemingly unrelated pricing effects from separate literatures: (1) the negative relationship between ex-ante return skewness and expected returns and (2) the negative relationship between dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts...

In this paper we survey the theoretical and empirical literatures on market liquidity. We organize both literatures around three basic questions: (a) how to measure illiquidity, (b) how illiquidity relates to underlying market imperfections and other asset characteristics, and (c) how...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...