This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of blockholders (large shareholders) in corporate governance. We start with the underlying property rights of public corporations; we discuss how blockholders are critical in addressing free-rider problems and why, like...

How effectively does a decentralized marketplace aggregate information that is dispersed throughout the economy? We study this question in a dynamic setting where sellers have private information that is correlated with an unobservable aggregate state. In any equilibrium, each seller's trading...

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 study strategic communication between a Sender and Receiver who are both uncertain about their preferred actions. The Sender observes noisy signals about both players' ideal policies and then communicates with the Receiver. Even though Sender and Receiver disagree about ideal policies as a...

Sudden big price changes are followed by periods of high and persistent volatility. I develop a tractable dynamic rational expectations model consistent with this observation. An infinity of agents possess dispersed information about future dividends and trade in centralized markets. Information...

We assess the ability of an information aggregation mechanism that operates in the over-the-counter market for financial derivatives to reduce valuation uncertainty among market participants. The analysis is based on a unique dataset of price estimates for S&P 500 index options that major...

Fair value refers to current values as the backbones of accounting measurements. Current value follows the efficient financial market (EFM) hypothesis - which abstracts away from economic realization - as guidance for the financial market investment process through ignorance and hazard. This...

We consider the effect of adaptive model selection and regularization by agents on price volatility and market stability in a simple agent-based model of a financial market. The agents base their trading behavior on forecasts of future returns, which they update adaptively and asynchronously...

We investigate the formation of market prices in a new experimental setting involving multi-period call-auction asset markets with state-dependent fundamentals. We are particularly interested in two informational aspects: (1) the role of traders who are informed about the true state and/or (2)...