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...

We derive equilibrium asset prices when fund managers deviate from benchmark indices to exploit noise-trader induced distortions but fund investors constrain these deviations. Because constraints force managers to buy assets that they underweight when these assets appreciate, overvalued assets...

We study the interaction of noisy demand and skewed asset payoffs. In our model, price as a function of quantities is convex in a neighborhood around zero if and only if skewness is positive. The combination of convexity and noise produces the idiosyncratic skewness effect--a documented negative...

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...

We propose a novel and tractable equilibrium model to study how information asymmetry, competition among market makers, and investors' risk aversion affect asset pricing, market illiquidity and welfare. The main innovation is that market makers compete through choosing simultaneously quantities...

Through extending a standard Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) noisy rational expectations economy by a heterogeneous signal structure with signal-specific differences in uncertainty, we show that price momentum as well as reversal are not intrinsically at odds with rational behavior. Differences in...

I present a new model of how ex-ante skewness affects expected asset prices. The price that supports a given short position in a positively- (negatively-) skewed asset is further from (closer to) expected value than is the price that supports a long position of the same magnitude, even in a...

We study the impact of short-sale constraints on market prices and liquidity in imperfectly competitive markets in which market-makers have market power. We show that, with or without information asymmetry, short-sale constraints decrease bid prices, but increase bid-ask spreads and...

We develop a new asset pricing theory that bridges two seemingly unrelated anomalies: (1) the negative relationship between dispersion in financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and expected returns and (2) the negative relationship between ex-ante skewness and expected returns. The results...

The information content of stock prices is analysed without imposing strong restrictions on traders' preferences and the distribution of dividends. Noise in the information contained in equilibrium prices arises from endogenous asset supply, which offsets price movements due to informed trading....