This paper documents that at the individual stock level, insiders' sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders' purchases peak only the month before a large jump.We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric...

This study first establishes a causal relation between insider trading and the likelihood of stock price crash occurrence, and then investigates potential channels through which the former influences the latter. Exploiting the initial enforcement of insider trading laws in a country as a natural...

We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which TARP funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most...

This paper sheds new light on the role bank executives played in the financial crisis. It examines whether they foresaw the poor performance of their own bank by analyzing their insider trading patterns. Insider trading during 2006 predicts stock returns during the crisis: a portfolio strategy...

We examine the ability of three groups of informed market participants to anticipate the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Institutional investors and financial analysts exhibit some awareness of the impending crisis in their preference for non-financial stocks over financial stocks. In contrast,...

This paper analyzes the impact of uncertainty on the spread of stock market crises, both theoretically and empirically. The effect of uncertainty about the fundamentals on investment decisions is an important cause of financial crises propagating across countries. Firstly, a coordination game on...

We analyze a rating agency's incentives to distort ratings in a model with a monopolistic profit maximizing rating agency, a continuum of heterogeneous firms, and a competitive market of risk-neutral investors. Firms sell bonds, the value of a firm's bond is known to the firm and observable by...

We examine the impact of institutional trading on stock resiliency during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We show that buy-side institutions have different exposure to liquidity factors based on their trading style. Liquidity supplying institutions absorb the long-term order imbalances in...

We find significant evidence of asymmetric information and signaling in post-crisis offerings in the auto asset-backed securities (ABS) market. Using granular regulatory reporting data, we are able to directly measure private information and quantify its effect on signaling and pricing. We show...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...