Many financial arrangements reference market prices that are yet to be realized at the time of contracting and consequently susceptible to manipulation. Two of the most common such arrangements are: (i) market-on-close contracts, which reference the price prevailing at the end of an execution...

Individuals facing competitive targets increase their effort but respond non-monotonically to the targets difficulty. We use a novel dataset of informal amateur cycling competitions to track the responses of individuals to competitively-set targets (in the form of displacement from the top of a...

We study the consequences of high-frequency trading (HFT) — and potential policy responses — via the tradeoff between liquidity and information production. Faster speeds facilitate HFT with consequences for this tradeoff: information production diminishes because informed traders have less...

In modern public equity markets, liquidity is provided by a heterogeneous set of traders with vastly different speeds. We study the consequences of information arrival in such a setting. We present a model that predicts faster traders achieve a relative increase in profits obtained from...

We use financial disclosures to construct the returns on real estate transactions by U.S. Congress members. Active Congress members outperform non-Congress members by 3.25% per year. They outperform financial professionals, doctors, and former Congress members by similar amounts. About 1/3 of...

We model procurement auctions held by institutional traders seeking fulfillment for large trades. The dealer who wins such an auction might fill the order out of inventory or access the market for additional volumes. How many dealers should the trader contact? There is a general tradeoff: an...

We study the optimal execution problem in a principal-agent setting. A client contracts to purchase a large position from a dealer at a future point in time. In the interim, the dealer acquires the position from the market, choosing how to split the parent order into smaller child orders. Price...