We analyze the choice between public and private equity financing of a unique, hand-collected sample of privately held firms that have indicated their willingness to raise outside equity.(...)

This paper investigates an important feature of market design: pre-trade transparency, defined as the availability of information about pending trading interest in the market. We look at how the NYSE´s introduction of OpenBook, which enables traders off the exchange floor to observe depth in...

In September 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) temporarily banned most short sales in nearly 1,000 financial stocks. We examine the ban's effect on market quality, shorting activity, the aggressiveness of short sellers, and stock prices. The ban's effects are concentrated...

We show that short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. Moreover, short interest is a better predictor of changes in firm fundamentals for stocks that are harder to short and short sellers appear to have information...

We document that the emergence of markets for single-name credit default swap (CDS) contracts adversely affects equity market quality. The finding that firms with traded CDS contracts on their debt have less liquid equity and less efficient stock prices is robust across a variety of market...

Using a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks between 1983 and 2004, we study the relation between institutional shareholdings and the relative informational efficiency of prices, measured as deviations from a random walk. Stocks with greater institutional ownership are priced more efficiently, and...

We study the information content in monthly short interest using NYSE-, AMEX-, and NASDAQ-listed stocks from 1988 to 2005. We show that stocks with relatively high short interest subsequently experience negative abnormal returns, but the effect can be transient and of debatable economic...

We provide new evidence on the relation between order flow and prices, an issue that is central to asset pricing and market microstructure. We examine proprietary data on a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks that reveal daily order imbalances by institutions, individuals, and market makers. We...

The percentage of U.S. equity held by institutional investors has quadrupled in the past four decades, and a prominent share of trading activity is due to institutions. Yet we know little about how institutions affect the informational efficiency of share prices, one important dimension of...

We analyze allocations to institutional and retail investors in 441 initial public offerings (IPOs). In addition to the well known favorable first-day returns, we show that institutions also obtain more allocations in IPOs with better long-term performance. We find that initial institutional...