The finance industry has grown. Financial markets have become more liquid. Information technology has improved. But have prices become more informative? Using stock and bond prices to forecast earnings, we find that the information content of market prices has not increased since 1960. The...

This paper investigates the relations between aggregate trading volume and information on financial markets from a theoretical standpoint. Through numerical examples, it relates some statistics describing equilibrium price and volume--such as the variance of the price and its correlation with...

Customer order flow correlates with permanent price changes in equity and non-equity markets. We examine macro news events in the thirty-year Treasury futures market to identify causality from customer flow to risk-free rates. We remove the positive feedback trading effect and establish that, in...

We test the hypothesis that the 2003 dividend tax cut boosted U.S. stock prices and thus lowered the cost of equity. Using an event- study methodology, we attempt to identify an aggregate stock market effect by comparing the behavior of U.S. common stock prices to that of European stocks and...

Numerous studies have documented the failure of consumption-based pricing models to explain observed patterns in stock and bond returns. This failure has sometimes been attributed to frictions, transaction costs or durability. If such frictions are important, they should primarily affect the...

We investigate the information content of inter-transaction time and find that it varies both across stocks and over time. On average, inter-transaction time is found to be informative whenever stocks are sufficiently traded. The magnitude of the information content is found to be larger for...

Stock market prices are procyclical, while investment good prices are countercyclical. A real business cycle model calibrated to these observations implies that 75% of the cyclical variation in aggregate output is due to an investment-specific technology shock, while the rest is due to an...