We show that firms intermediating trade have incentives to overinvest in financial expertise, and that these investments can be destabilizing. Financial expertise in our model improves firms' ability to accurately estimate value when trading a security. It creates adverse selection, which under...

U.S. business investment has taken a serious toll during the global financial crisis and also in the recovery phase investment did not pick up as expected. What is surprising is that the alleged investment slowdown happened at a time of record corporate profits and retained earnings, highly...

I discuss Minnis (2011) in the context of the broader literature on private firm financing. In particular, I focus on the unique features of the private firm setting and how it affects research design and inference. I detail the alternative information sources available to debt financiers of...

I examine how verification of financial statements influences debt pricing. I use a large proprietary database of privately-held U.S. firms, an important business sector in which the information environment is opaque and financial statement audits are not mandated. I find that audited firms have...

I discuss Minnis [2010] in the context of the broader literature on private firm financing. In particular, I focus on the unique features of the private firm setting and how it affects research design and inference. I detail the alternative information sources available to debt financiers of...

We study the dynamics of fund manager ownership for a sample of U.S. equity mutual funds from 2005 to 2011. We find that ownership changes positively predict changes in future risk-adjusted fund performance. A one-standard-deviation increase in ownership predicts a 1.6 percent increase in alpha...

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...

In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders. A Hasbrouck (1991) structural vector autoregression shows that the facility increased...

Crowded trades by similarly trading peers influence the dynamics of asset prices, possibly creating systemic risk. We propose a market clustering measure using granular trading data. For each stock the clustering measure captures the degree of trading overlap among any two investors in that...

Because uncertainty is high in bad times, investors find it harder to assess firm prospects and, hence, should value analyst output more. However, higher uncertainty makes analysts' tasks harder so it is unclear if analyst output is more valuable in bad times. We find that, in bad times, analyst...