Because of limited liability, insolvent banks have an incentive to continue lending to insolvent borrowers, in order to hide losses and gamble for resurrection, even though this is socially inefficient. We suggest a scheme that regulators could use to solve this problem. The scheme would induce banks to reveal their bad loans, which can then be dealt with. Bank participation in the scheme would…
We analyze a model in which traders have different trading opportunities and learn information from prices. The difference in trading opportunities implies that different traders may have different trading motives when trading in the same market—some trade for speculation and others for hedging—and thus they may respond to the same information in opposite directions. This implies that addin…
We develop and solve a model of optimal portfolio choice with transaction costs and predictability in house prices. We model house prices using a process with a time-varying expected growth rate. Housing adjustments are infrequent and characterized by both the wealth-to-housing ratio and the expected growth in house prices. We find that the housing portfolio share immediately after moving to a …
We examine empirically how the supply and maturity structure of government debt affect bond yields and expected returns. We organize our investigation around a term-structure model in which risk-averse arbitrageurs absorb shocks to the demand and supply for bonds of different maturities. These shocks affect the term structure because they alter the price of duration risk. Consistent with the mo…
We study how firms allocate cash flow by estimating the cash-flow sensitivities of various uses of cash flow. We decompose cash flow into a transitory and a permanent component and focus on the allocation of the transitory component, which by construction contains little information about future growth opportunities. We find that more financially constrained firms allocate more transitory cash …
The paper analyzes a very stylized model of crises and demonstrates how the degree of strategic complementarity in the actions of investors is a critical determinant of fragility. It is shown how the balance sheet composition of a financial intermediary, parameters of the information structure (precisions of public and private information), and the level of stress indicators in the market impin…
This paper studies the implications of opacity in financial markets for investor behavior, asset prices, and welfare. Transparent funds (e.g. mutual funds) and opaque funds (e.g. hedge funds) trade transparent assets (e.g. plain-vanilla products) and opaque assets (e.g. structured products). Investors can observe neither opaque funds' portfolios nor opaque assets' payoffs. Consistent with empir…
As illustrated in the tale of "the dog that did not bark," the absence of news and the passage of time often contain information. We test whether markets fully incorporate this information using the empirical context of mergers. During the year after merger announcement, the passage of time is informative about the probability that the merger will ultimately complete. We show that the variation…
In this paper, we study asset prices in a dynamic, continuous-time, and general-equilibrium endowment economy in which agents have "catching up with the Joneses" utility functions and differ with respect to their beliefs (because of differences in priors) and their preference parameters for time discount, risk aversion, and sensitivity to habit. A key contribution of our paper is to demonstrate…
We investigate the effect of ambiguity about hedge fund investment strategies on asset prices and aggregate welfare. We model some traders (mutual funds) as facing ambiguity about the equilibrium trading strategies of other traders (hedge funds). This ambiguity limits the ability of mutual funds to infer information from prices and has negative effects on market outcomes. We use this analysis t…
We study whether investors can exploit serial dependence in stock returns to improve out-of-sample portfolio performance. We show that a vector-autoregressive (VAR) model captures stock return serial dependence in a statistically significant manner. Analytically, we demonstrate that, unlike contrarian and momentum portfolios, an arbitrage portfolio based on the VAR model attains positive expect…
Time constraints, managerial power, and reputational concerns can impede board communication. This paper develops a model where board decisions depend on directors' effort in communicating their information to others. I show that directors communicate more effectively when pressure for conformity is stronger—that is, when directors are more reluctant to disagree with each other. Hence, open b…
We find that the stock market underreacts to stock-level liquidity shocks: liquidity shocks are not only positively associated with contemporaneous returns, but they also predict future return continuations for up to six months. Long-short portfolios sorted on liquidity shocks generate significant returns of 0.70% to 1.20% per month that are robust across alternative shock measures and after co…
Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt and the likelihood of financial distress among those who consider themselves poorer than their peers. We use unique responses describing perceived peer characteristics from a D…
Social media has become a popular venue for individuals to share the results of their own analysis on financial securities. This paper investigates the extent to which investor opinions transmitted through social media predict future stock returns and earnings surprises. We conduct textual analysis of articles published on one of the most popular social media platforms for investors in the Unit…
We study the trading behavior of investors in an entire stock market. Using an account level dataset of all trades on the Istanbul Stock Exchange in 2005, we identify investors with similar trading behavior as linked in an empirical investor network (EIN). Consistent with the theory of information networks, we find that central investors earn higher returns and trade earlier than peripheral inv…
Using a strategic rational expectations equilibrium framework, we show that forcing a well-informed insider to disclose her trades in advance tends to increase welfare for both the insider and less-informed outsiders. Advance disclosure generates price risk for the insider, and to mitigate this risk, the insider trades less aggressively on her private information. Consequently, outsiders face l…
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We show that in misspecified models with useless factors (for example, factors that are independent of the returns on the test assets), the standard inference procedures tend to erroneously conclude, with high probability, that these irrelevant factors are priced and the restrictions of the model hold. Our proposed model selection procedure, which is robust to useless factors and potential mode…
This paper studies the quantitative impact of microprudential bank regulations on bank lending and value metrics of efficiency and welfare in a dynamic model of banks that are financed by debt and equity, undertake maturity transformation, are exposed to credit and liquidity risks, and face financing frictions. We show that: (a) there exists an inverted U?shaped relationship between bank lendin…