During financial crises, financial market regulators often restrict short-selling to support prices and curb volatility. However, evidence suggests that short-selling bans during the turmoil in financial markets in 2007--2009 failed to achieve regulators' goals. We analyze a model of costly...

In the standard perfectly competitive model of costly information acquisition, private information always has a strictly positive value as long as prices are not perfectly revealing. We show that with imperfect competition, characterized by a finite number of traders, the value of private...

Do bond issuers successfully time the market? To answer this question, we compare market conditions on an issue day with conditions on days in a window around the issue day. We find that compared with windows of 21 days around issue days, bond issuers time the risk-free rate better than pure...

We study the role of private information in the equity-lending market in a rational expectations model with endogenous loan fees. When all investors are privately informed, an increase in information precision reduces the fee by increasing trading aggressiveness and decreasing demand dispersion....

We show two surprising consequences of introducing endogenous information acquisition into an imperfectly competitive trading model characterized by a small number of traders. First, the marginal value of private information can be negative, resulting in an equilibrium with no...

We propose a risk-based firm-type explanation on why stocks of firms with high relative short interest (RSI) have lower future returns. We argue that these firms have negative alphas because they are a hedge against expected aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with this argument, we show that...

Using 2002–2014 insurer transactions, we provide the first empirical evidence on underwriters' allocation practices in the primary market for corporate bonds. Since bonds are often underpriced, allocations generate for investors an estimated $41 billion of first-day profits. These profits...

Management frequently attributes earnings news to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry-wide shocks and firm-specific actions to which the earnings news in management...

This study uses security-level investor demand and dynamic pricing information in the primary bond market to examine investor tastes for ESG assets and their pricing effects. We find that green bonds are significantly more oversubscribed than their conventional counterparts offered by the same...