Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a new form of fundraising whereby blockchain-related ventures raise public capital in exchange for newly issued digital tokens. In recent years, ICOs have been a prominent focus of legal and economic studies, which analyze their characteristics and determinants...

Security market regulation violations should be dealt seriously because it involves public money and deviations will lead to large scale economic repercussion. Mutual Fund (MF) stakeholders such as Asset Management Companies (AMC) have the duty and responsibility to adhere and comply with the...

The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for permissionless blockchains: Each individual miner's cross-pool diversification and endogenous fees charged by pools generally sustain decentralization, because larger pools...

Focusing on downgrades as stress events that drive the selling of corporate bonds, we document that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased after the Volcker Rule. Dealers regulated by the Rule have decreased their market-making activities while non-Volcker-affected dealers have not...

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve diversification, and payment of excessive fund fees. Over the past thirty-five years, however, participant-directed 401(k) plans have largely replaced professionally...

I study how analysts' performance depends on their incentives using a regulatory shock and the textual content of analyst reports. My results focus on two aspects of performance, information production and bias. After incentives are reduced, analysts produce less information that is also less...

Market makers play a central role in options markets, where they account for 99.9% of open orders. Providing liquidity at this scale is only possible because of quote protection (QP) mechanisms that limit how quickly open orders can be filled — say, in the event of a market crash or system...

We investigate the trading of corporate bonds on alternative trading system (ATS) platforms. We draw a key distinction between request-for-quote (RFQ) and electronic communication network (ECN) trading protocols, which balance investors' preference for immediacy and anonymity. Trades on ATS...

The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top...