Recently exchanges have been directly selling market data. We analyze how this practice affects price discovery, the cost of capital, return volatility, and market liquidity. We show that selling price data increases the cost of capital and volatility, worsens market efficiency and liquidity,...

We study how dynamic research affects information acquisition in financial markets. In our strategic trading model, the trader performs costly research to generate private information but does not always succeed. Optimal research activity responds to market conditions and generates novel...

The current research assesses the risks commonly attributed to the presence of HFT in the context of different market structures deployed by the U.S. exchanges. In particular, we find that, by design, the so-called “normal” exchanges have the lowest market quality, including the highest...

On financial markets, information is a highly demanded resource and processing it to (potentially) generate excess returns drives the activities of many market participants. Not surprisingly, this high relevance of information in markets culminates in a high research interest focusing on how...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

In this paper, we show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on the idiosyncratic coskewness beta, which measures the co-movement of the individual stock variance and the market return. We find that there is a negative...

Investing in financial securities inevitably involves risks on the one hand and opportunities on the other hand. This thesis bundles four different studies on risks and/or opportunities in financial markets. In one study, we examine the cross-sectional explanatory power of different...

We show that institutional portfolio rules induce regression discontinuity experiments in stock markets using the Russell indices. Stocks are ranked each May 31st based on their market capitalization. Those ranked above the 1000 cut-off are in the Russell 1000. Those below the 1000 cut-off and...

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...