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...

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...

We document that leverage-adjusted returns on S&P 500 index call and put portfolios are decreasing in their strike-to-price ratio over 1986-2010, contrary to the prediction of the Black-Scholes-Merton model. We test a large number of plausible unconditional factor models and find that only...

Skilled investors make money off uninformed investors. By acting as intermediaries, they provide a hedge to the uninformed investors themselves. I present a model in which households have imperfect information about expected returns. Non-traded income shocks lead them to rebalance, sometimes at...

We build a macro-finance model of shadow banking: the transformation of risky assets into securities that are money-like in quiet times but become illiquid when uncertainty spikes. Shadow banking economizes on scarce collateral, expanding liquidity provision in booms, boosting asset prices and...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has been revolutionized. But have financial market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from...

We build a macroeconomic model that centers on liquidity transformation in the financial sector. Intermediaries maximize liquidity creation by issuing securities that are money-like in normal times but become illiquid in a crash when collateral is scarce. We call this process shadow banking. A...