We study price pressures in stock prices-price deviations from fundamental value due to a risk-averse intermediary supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, twelve years of daily New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveal economically large price pressures. A...

Measures of income concentration—such as the share of income received by the highest income families—may be biased by pro-cyclical volatility in annual income. Permanent income, though, can smooth away such volatility and sort families by their usual economic resources. Here, we...

Do public policy signals improve the alignment of market outcomes with economic fundamentals? Existing work contends that, when individual players have an incentive to coordinate their actions, public policy signals could steer these actions away from the fundamentals. We argue that such a...

We propose a tractable equilibrium model to examine how margin requirements affectasset prices, market volatility, and market participants' welfare. Weshow that margin requirements can have opposite effects on market volatility whenthey constrain different investors and thus can help explain why...

Commodity price volatility in international markets has been used to justify numerous policy interventions, including the need for buffer stocks and counter-cyclical payments. The common measure of volatility, the standard deviation or coefficient of variation, likely overstates the actual...