Discrimination is notoriously difficult to document. Convincing tests for discrimination require good measures of the legitimate determinants of the outcome of interest, for example wages and productivity. While few contexts provide data adequate to the task of measuring discrimination, copious...

How does increased noise trading affect market liquidity and trading costs? We use "The Wall Street Journal"'s "Investment Dartboard" column, which stimulates noise trading, as a natural experiment to evaluate models of the bid-ask spread. We find that substantial increases in trading volume and...

We propose an “M&A activity” hypothesis as a partial explanation for IPO underpricing. When going public during active corporate control markets, managers may take actions intended to safeguard their control. In support of this conjecture, we find that pre-IPO M&A activity directly explains...