the informational role of stock and bond volume in a kyle 1985 model the sign of the correlation between a firm s debt and equity returns is the same as the sign of the cross market kyle s lambda the sign is positive negative if private information concerns the mean risk of the firm s assets we show empirically that information conveyed by order flows is primarily about asset means the cross market lambdas are quite large consequently the portions of bond and stock returns explained by order flows are highly correlated even though the order flows themselves are virtually uncorrelated

the economics of exchange rate regimes a review essay the exchange rate regime issue has taken centre stage in discussions of international economic policy much of the profession appears to have been converted to the hypothesis of the vanishing middle regime for countries well integrated into world capital markets there is little if any middle ground between floating exchange rates and monetary unification this paper considers the exchange rate regime issue in the context of recent books on the subject by w max corden and morris goldstein both authors prescribe managed floating exchange rates supplemented with inflation targeting for emerging market economies under managed floating and with a credible monetary policy the public finances in order and strengthened debt management and prudential regulation the exchange rate is free to act as a market gauge for assessing policies and as a mode of conflict resolution both authors also argue however that no exchange rate regime is a holy grail ultimately a credible exchange rate regime depends upon the trust evoked by governments there is no exchange rate regime whether of the managed floating or hard fix variety that can eradicate a history of failed stabilisation attempts

prices or knowledge what drives demand for financial services in emerging markets this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled prices or knowledge what drives demand for financial services in emerging markets conducted in 2008 in indonesia the study observed that financial development is critical for growth but its micro determinants are not well understood financial literacy training has no impact on the probability of opening a bank account although it does have an impact among those with low levels of education and financial literacy a change from 3 to 14 led to a 7 6 percent increase in the probability of owning a bank account the results hold two years after a study funding for the study derived from world bank hbs division of research and faculty development

imperfect information and cross autocorrelation among stock prices i develop a model to explain why stock returns are positively cross autocorrelated when market makers observe noisy signals about the value of their stocks but cannot instantaneously condition prices on the signals of other stocks which contain marketwide information the pricing error of one stock is correlated with the other signals as market makers adjust prices after observing true values or previous price changes of other stocks stock returns become positively crossautocorrelated if the signal quality differs among stocks the cross autocorrelation pattern is asymmetric i show that both own and cross autocorrelations are higher when market movements are larger

why the middle is unstable the political economy of exchange rate regimes and currency crises the contribution of sticky exchange rates to the rash of currency crises over the past decade has become a major topic of international monetary analysis and policy discussion while there is widespread agreement among economists that the middle of the exchange rate spectrum adjustable pegs is highly crisis prone in a world of substantial capital mobility jeffrey frankel has recently argued that surprisingly we lack a clear theoretical rationale for why this is so this paper attempts to fill that void it argues that frankel is correct in terms of economic analysis alone but that when political economy considerations are introduced then a satisfactory explanation is at hand key aspects of this political economy perspective are laid out and implications for exchange rate policy are considered the analysis suggests that for promoting currency stability the traditionally debated distinctions between crawling bands and managed floats are likely less important than the political environments in which they are operated

the effects of inflation news on high frequency stock returns previous research using daily returns finds conflicting evidence about the relationship between unanticipated inflation news and stock returns we explore the relationship by looking at the response in minutes and trades of size based stock portfolios to unexpected changes in the regularly scheduled producer price index and consumer price index announcements in particular we answer the following three questions 1 do stocks respond to inflation news 2 what is the speed and path of that response 3 is the response stable or does it vary with the economy the direction of the news or time

return autocorrelation and institutional investors abstract we propose and test the hypothesis that trading by institutional investors contributes to serial correlation in daily returns our results demonstrate that nyse particles and individual security daily return autocorrelationsare an increasing function of the level of institutional ownership moreover the results are consistent with the hypothesis that institutional trading reflects information and increases the speed of price adjustment the relation between autocorrelation and institutional holdings does not however apparent to be driven by market frictions or rational time varying required rates of return we conclude that institutional investors correlated trading patterns contribute to axial correlation in daily returns

when ownership structure matters a review of the effects of investor horizon on corporate policies this paper surveys the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies while the desire to encourage long term investor ownership is shared among managers boards and policy makers how greater long term investor ownership benefits corporate decisions and ultimately firm performance is still under academic investigation the contribution of this paper is twofold the paper s first contribution is providing an up to date review of theoretical and empirical findings this paper introduces the groups of long term and short term investors and the related classification methodologies and investor horizon proxies used to form them it further reviews the determinants of an investor s horizon then this paper organizes the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies around three main channels the short term pressure hypothesis the monitoring hypothesis and the catering hypothesis the paper s second contribution is identifying six major challenges ahead that need to be addressed to improve the understanding of the impact of long term short term investor ownership on corporates policies these challenges represent opportunities for further research

liquidity dynamics and cross autocorrelations this paper examines the relation between information transmission and cross autocorrelations we present a simple model where informed trading is transmitted from large to small stocks with a lag in equilibrium large stock illiquidity induced by informed trading portends stronger cross autocorrelations empirically we find that the lead lag relation increases with lagged large stock illiquidity further the lead from large stock order flows to small stock returns is stronger when large stock spreads are higher in addition this lead lag relation is stronger before macro announcements when information based trading is more likely and weaker afterward when information asymmetries are lower

government spending and budget deficits in the industrial economies fiscal policy nouriel roubini and jeffrey sachs this paper examines the evolution of the size of government and of budget deficits in oecd economies we highlight the rapid increase in government spending in the 1970s the sharp rise in budget deficits and public debt after 1973 and the reversal in these trends in the 1980s the increase in the size of government was associated in part with the slowdown in growth after 1973 but also reflected gradual adjustment of the ratio of spending to output towards a long run target which depends on political and institutional characteristics of the economy the political orientation of the government the degree of wage indexation and the degree of stability of the political system such factors also explain the size of budget deficits when faced with an adverse shock subsequent deficit reduction requires a measure of political consensus we note that such consensus is hard to achieve in multi party coalitions in consequence countries with such a political structure tended in consequence countries with such a political structure tended toin consequence countries with such a political structure tended to experience much more rapid increases in their debt gnp ratios

the new theory of optimum currency areas highbrow opinion is like a hunted hare if you stand long enough it will come back to the place it started from dennis robertson

an empirical examination of information differences of opinion and trading activity abstract we investigate the relations between trading volumes and our proxies for information flows and divergences in opinions we view s p 500 index futures open interest as a useful proxy for divergences of traders opinions and find that volumes are higher on days when open interest increases than on days with declines volume in individual equities is more closely related to firm specific information flows while equity basket volume is more closely associated with market information this differential impact is greatest for small capitalization stocks where market wide news has no explanatory power

trading volume and cross autocorrelations in stock returns this paper finds that trading volume is a significant determinant of the lead lag patterns observed in stock returns daily and weekly returns on high volume portfolios lead returns on low volume portfolios controlling for firm size nonsynchronous trading or low volume portfolio autocorrelations cannot explain these findings these patterns arise because returns on low volume portfolios respond more slowly to information in market returns the speed of adjustment of individual stocks confirms these findings overall the results indicate that differential speed of adjustment to information is a significant source of the cross autocorrelation patterns in short horizon stock returns both academics and practitioners have long been interested in the role played by trading volume in predicting future stock returns 1 in this paper we examine the interaction between trading volume and the predictability of short horizon stock returns specifically that due to lead lag cross autocorrelations in stock returns our investigation indicates that trading volume is a significant determinant of the cross autocorrelation patterns in stock returns 2 we find that daily or weekly returns of stocks with high trading volume lead daily or weekly returns of stocks with low trading volume additional tests indicate that this effect is related to the tendency of high volume stocks to respond rapidly and low volume stocks to respond slowly to marketwide information

financial interdependence and the state international monetary relations at century s end as the twentieth century draws to a close one can find sharply contrasting views among leading scholars on almost every key issue in positive international political economy how strong are international as opposed to domestic influences on policy how important are issues of national security high politics versus economic considerations low politics what role do institutions international and domestic play in influencing and constraining the behavior of governments why is international cooperation rare but not unheard of the list goes on and on

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

informed trading and portfolio returns we solve a multi period model of strategic trading with long lived information in multiple assets with correlated innovations in fundamental values market makers in each asset can only condition their price functions on trading in the that asset but not on trading in the other asset using daily non public data from the new york stock exchange we test the model s predictions on the lead lag relations of institutional order ows and returns within portfolios we flnd support for the model prediction of positive autocorrelations in portfolio returns as well as the predictions for how informed order ow positively predicts future returns and future informed order ow as the model predicts we flnd these relations strengthen for portfolios formed from assets with higher correlation of fundamental values

imperfect competition in a multi security market with risk neutrality the central purpose of this paper is to develop a model of insider trading i e trading based on private information in the context of an imperfectly competitive multi security market with risk neutral agents imperfect competition allows us to consider strategic behavior and a multi security market lets us study the effect of a correlated environment on equilibrium we employ the informational assumption that market makers can observe all order flows and so portfolio diversification arises in this model for strategic reasons given correlated fundamentals market makers can potentially learn about every security from each order flow this causes even a risk neutral trader who does not face short selling restrictions to refrain from determining the demand for each security independently this contrasts with traditional multi asset models which focus on the incentive to reduce portfolio variance or the effect of short selling restrictions or budget constraints under imperfect competition correlation has two effects one ceteris paribus it allows the uninformed to learn from additional variables since each order flow could potentially have information about all payoffs on the other hand it creates an incentive for informed traders to restrict what others can learn from public information thus our analysis can be viewed as an application to the multi security heterogeneous information model in admati 1985 of the imperfectly competitive equilibrium concept which kyle 1985 first applied to the single security homogeneous information model of grossman and stiglitz 1980 our principal results include an explicit characterization of a linear equilibrium as a function of three general covariance matrices associated with payoffs noise trading and errors in private signals under general covariance structures we show that there always exists an equilibrium in which the relationship between the vector of prices and the vector of order flows is governed by a symmetric positive definite matrix the plan of the paper is as follows in section 2 we introduce our model we derive the equilibrium in section 3 and section 4 comments on the properties of the equilibrium the proofs of the results are in the appendix

illiquidity contagion and liquidity crashes liquidity providers often learn information about an asset from prices of other assets we show that this generates a self reinforcing positive relationship between price informativeness and liquidity this relationship causes liquidity spillovers and is a source of fragility a small drop in the liquidity of one asset can through a feedback loop result in a very large drop in market liquidity and price informativeness a liquidity crash this feedback loop provides a new explanation for comovements in liquidity and liquidity dry ups it also generates multiple equilibria

cross asset speculation in stock markets in practice heterogeneously informed speculators combine private information about multiple stocks with information in prices taking into account how their trades influence the inferences of other speculators via prices we show how this speculation causes prices to be more correlated than asset fundamentals raising price volatility the covariance structure of asset fundamentals drives that of prices while the covariance structure of liquidity trade drives that of order flows we characterize how speculator profits vary with the distributions of information and liquidity trade across assets and speculators and relate the cross asset factor structure of order flows to that of returns

the mirage of fixed exchange rates this paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets contrary to popular wisdom industrialized country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange parities against virtually any private speculative attack but if their commitment to use those resources lacks credibility with markets the costs to the broader economy of defending an exchange rate peg can be very high the dynamic interplay between credibility and commitment is illustrated by the 1992 swedish and british crises and the 1994 95 mexican collapse we also discuss the small number of successful fixers

those who know most insider trading in eighteenth century amsterdam this paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern day markets specifically the paper looks at english securities traded in both london and amsterdam private information reached amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all results are consistent with a kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically most importantly the speed of information revelation in amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public

the threshold effect in expected volatility a model based on asymmetric information this article develops theoretical insight into the threshold effect in expected volatility which means that large shocks are less persistent in volatility than small shocks the model uses the kyle admati pfleiderer setup with liquidity traders informed traders and a market maker information is modeled as a garch process it is shown that the garch process for information is transformed into a tarch process for threshold garch for the market price changes working with information flows allows one to derive implications for trading volume and market liquidity which provide the basis for a more complete test of the model article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

insider trading without normality in this paper we analyse the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a particular class of monopolistic rational expectations models we show the equivalence between the kyle 1985 model of insider trading where the insider observes the amount of noise trading and the kyle 1989 model of informed speculation when there is one risk neutral insider and many risk neutral market makers we show that in these two equivalent models i there exists a unique equilibrium independently of the distribution of uncertainty ii this equilibrium minimizes the expected gains of the informed agent under incentive compatibility constraints we extend our results to a class of signalling games

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

stock return cross autocorrelations and market conditions in japan we show that changes in market conditions significantly affect cross autocorrelations and speed of adjustment in weekly stock returns we find significant positive cross autocorrelations between weekly returns on a portfolio of small firms and lagged large firm portfolio returns only when the lagged aggregate market has experienced a decline in value these positive return cross autocorrelations are also associated with lower abnormal portfolio trading volume and greater delays in the adjustment of individual stock prices to negative market wide information particularly for small firms the effect of lagged market states cannot be explained by market microstructure biases such as nonsynchronous trading or thin trading

institutions and investors the politics of the economic crisis in southeast asia the most dramatic development in the international political economy during the 1990s the asian economic crisis deserves our attention given that asia s rapid economic rise spawned so many debates in the literature it is peculiar that a radical interruption to asia s economic development has not engendered more theoretical argument among political scientists economists have engaged in furious and productive debate but have been unable to deal with the political dimensions of the crisis in this article i make a strong claim about the importance of politics in explaining one of the big puzzles in the overall saga why the investment reversal was greater in some countries than in others i argue that a tight focus on political institutions yields a remarkable degree of analytic purchase in explaining why some countries coped better than others during the crisis specie cally i stress the distribution of veto authority highlighting the way this shaped the overall character of the policy environment and in turn affected investors i identify two policy syndromes rigidity and volatility that are at opposite ends of a continuum and are severely suboptimal for investors particularly during times of crisis i show that these two syndromes can be directly linked to the institutional framework of government the wider the dispersal of veto authority the greater the risk of policy rigidity conversely the tighter the concentration of veto authority the greater the risk of policy volatility these two policy syndromes bear directly on the differing responses of governments to the crisis much of the best literature on the asian crisis has come from economists and falls into one of three theoretical clusters variants of e rst generation currency crisis models that emphasize imbalances in macroeconomic fundamentals variants of

sell side debt analysts and debt market efficiency we explore sell side debt analysts contributions to the efficiency of securities markets we document that debt returns lag equity returns less when debt research coverage exists which is consistent with debt analysts facilitating the process by which available information is impounded in debt prices the effect of debt research on the debt market s lag is incremental to but comparable in magnitude to hedge fund ownership s effect no such effect exists for credit rating agencies we also find that the dissemination of debt reports has an immediate effect on return volatility in both markets which is consistent with debt analysts providing new information to securities markets increased return covariation suggests that this information impacts the pricing of debt and equity in the same direction a large percentage of debt reports do not induce any immediate debt market return reaction but do induce an equity return reaction which is consistent with new information being provided despite the absence of a debt market reaction finally there is a systematic variation in the debt market s trading and return reactions to debt research timely reports and those by high reputation brokers induce a quicker trading response thus enhancing liquidity whereas only timely reports induce a greater return response this study illuminates the institutional underpinnings of debt market efficiency and it has important implications for information content tests in the debt market where trading is limited

investment analysis and the adjustment of stock prices to common information in this article we are concerned with the effect of the number of investment analysts following a firm on the speed of adjustment of the firm s stock price to new information that has common effects across firms it is found that returns on portfolios of firms that are followed by many analysts tend to lead those of firms that are followed by fewer analysts even when the firms are of approximately the same size many analyst firms also tend to respond more rapidly to market returns than do few analyst firms adjusting for firm size this relation however is nonlinear and the marginal effect of the number of analysts on the speed of price adjustment increases with the number of analysts article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

exchange rate policies in asia in an era of financial globalisation an empirical assessment ebbs and flows of capital have complicated macroeconomic policy management for all emerging market and developing economies emdes regardless of whether they have adopted flexible or managed exchange rate regimes in the light of the renewed interest in the trilemma versus dilemma debate we contribute to the related literature by presenting an empirical analysis of exchange rate flexibility and intervention for selected asian emdes over the time period 2001 2016 in addition to estimating augmented frankel wei regressions we employ a generalised auto regressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch model to assess the extent of foreign exchange fx intervention and whether there exist any asymmetries in the way countries intervene our results show that although there is greater flexibility in exchange rates there is evidence of some countries potentially using fx intervention to manage currency movements we also find evidence of asymmetry in intervention where exchange rate volatility responds more emphatically to fx sales than purchases

family labour force participation multinomial logit estimates studies of labour force participation choices are mostly aimed at explaining determinants of participation for individuals the objective of this study is the empirical estimation of the parameters of family participation decisions family participation decisions can be analysed as a choice problem of a family between a finite number of distinct alternatives the appropriate estimation procedure for a model involving choice among multiple discrete alternatives requires a statistical technique different from ordinary least squares in this study i use the multinomial logit model a logit model allows me to explain the probability that a particular participation alternative will be chosen by a family as a function of a set of independent variables it is found that economic variables such as wage rates and wealth play a significant role in affecting the probabilities of choosing a particular labour force participation alternative this study shows that an increase in the market wage for a family member not

the effect of public information and competition on trading volume and price volatility in a one period model of market making with many exogenously informed traders we first show that the variance of prices and expected trading volume depend on the public information released at the start of trading this is accomplished by representing beliefs with elliptically countoured distributions for which the form of optimal decision rules does not depend on the specific distribution used second if the model is altered so that the decision to become informed is made endogenous then the decision rules of the market maker and infomed traders depend on the public information third in a multiperiod model with many informed traders and long lived private information recursion formulas similar to those of kyle 1985 hold for all elliptically contoured distributions trading volume is autocorrelated and unless per period liquidity trading is bounded away from zero as new trading periods are added informed traders profits vanish article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

estimating the parameters of a household production function with joint products by estimating the parameters of a production function whose inputs consist of family time and market goods the authors offer some new microeconomic estimates of the value of production that takes place in the home and also examine the concept of joint production that is the degree to which time devoted to home production simultaneously serves as leisure they find evidence of substantial jointness between home production time and leisure the degree of which is greater for wives than for husbands and that both husband and wife possess human capital skills more productive in market work than in home work

daily momentum and contrarian behavior of index fund investors we use a two year panel of individual accounts in an s p 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91 000 investors who have chosen a low cost passively managed vehicle for savings we identify classes of momentum investors and contrarian investors we use these classes to build up behavioral factors based on contrarian and momentum flows and we show that they are relevant for pricing they perform well against a benchmark of loadings on latent factors extracted from returns

an empirical model of a household s choice of activities this paper analyses how households of school age children choose to participate in the labour force volunteer work democratic assemblies and child related leisure activities contrary to previous studies the model presented in this paper treats all of these household s choice of activities involving time allocation decisions as simultaneously determined the empirical section uses qualitative data estimation techniques which permit a wide range of joint and interaction effects among the variables of the model the results confirm the importance of time opportunity cost variables as major determinants of household s choice of activities with the mother s education consituting a particularly important factor

lifetime consumption labor supply and fertility a complete demand system this paper applies an empirical method based on a complete demand system to the study of lifetime consumption labor supply and fertility previous research in this area has not used complete demand systems or rigorously connected empirical analysis with the theoretical model an approach to estimating crucial but unmeasured variables is proposed the results are generally supportive of a price income effects model excerpt

information sales and insider trading with long lived information fundamental information resembles in many respects a durable good hence the eects of its incorporation into stock prices depend on who is the agent controlling its flow similarly to a durable goods monopolist a monopolistic analyst selling information intertemporally competes against herself this forces her to partially relinquish control over the information flow to traders conversely an insider solves the intertemporal competition problem through vertical integration thus exerting a tighter control over the flow of information comparing market patterns i show that a dynamic market where information is provided by an analyst is thicker and more informative than one where an insider trades

indexing and stock market serial dependence around the world abstract we show a striking change in index return serial dependence across 20 major market indexes covering 15 countries in north america europe and asia while many studies find serial dependence to be positive until the 1990s it switches to negative since the 2000s this change happens in most stock markets around the world and is both statistically significant and economically meaningful further tests reveal that the decline in serial dependence links to the increasing popularity of index products e g futures exchange traded funds and index mutual funds the link between serial dependence and indexing is not driven by a time trend holds up in the cross section of stock indexes is confirmed by tests exploiting nikkei 225 index weights and standard poor s 500 membership and in part reflects the arbitrage mechanism between index products and the underlying stocks

stock return serial dependence and out of sample portfolio performance 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 expected returns regardless of the sign of asset return cross covariances and autocovariances empirically we show however that both the arbitrage and mean variance portfolios based on the var model outperform the traditional unconditional portfolios only for transaction costs below ten basis points

exchange rate regimes for emerging markets moral hazard and international overborrowing this paper investigates the role of the exchange rate regime in a simple fisherian model of the overborrowing syndrome where domestic banks are subject to moral hazard the choice of exchange rate regime may have important implications for the macroeconomic stability of the economy banks that enjoy government guarantees have an incentive to increase foreign borrowing and incur foreign exchange risks that are underwritten by the deposit insurance system in the absence of capital controls this increases the magnitude of overborrowing and leaves the economy both more vulnerable to speculative attack and more exposed to the real economic consequences of such an attack while bad exchange rate pegs will tend to exacerbate the problem of overborrowing in emerging markets it is unclear that flexible exchange rate always dominate fixed exchange rates a good fix one that is credible and close to purchasing power parity may reduce the super risk premium in domestic interest rates and thereby narrow the margin of temptation for banks to overborrow internationally contrary to the current consensus regarding the lessons that should be drawn from the asian crisis a good fix may better stabilise the domestic economy while limiting moral hazard in the banking system

asymmetric information and stock return cross autocorrelations abstract using an asset pricing model under asymmetric information we show that asymmetric lead lag patterns in stock returns cannot be solely explained by information asymmetry additional frictions are necessary to produce asymmetry in return cross autocorrelations

a signal jamming theory of predation we propose a new theory ofpredation based on signal jamming in our model the predator s characteristics are common knowledge while the entrant is uncertain of his own future profitability the entrant uses his current profit to decide whether to remain in the market and the predator preys to jam or interfere with this inference problem thus our model differs from those based on reputation effects in which the predator preys to signal information about himself

exchange rate volatility before and after the float this paper provides a descriptive analysis of broad features of major exchange rates since the early 1970s and compares these features with those of the 1960s the analysis is then extended to investigate whether these features are manifested in interest rates and in commodity prices the results indicate that while the exchange rates have become more volatile during the current floating rate regime the moments are comparable with those for interest rates and commodity prices

long lived private information and imperfect competition we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple privately informed agents strategically exploit their long lived information we show that such traders compete aggressively and cause most of their common private information to be revealed very rapidly in the limit as the interval between auctions approaches zero market depth becomes infinite and all private information is revealed immediately these results are in contrast to those of kyle 1985 in which the monopolistic informed trader causes his information to be incorporated into prices gradually and when the interval between auctions is vanishingly small market depth is constant over time fama 1970 defines a strong form efficient market as one in which security prices fully reflect all available information including both publicly and privately held information in a pioneering and influential article kyle 1985 develops a model in which a single privately informed trader with long lived information optimally exploits his monopoly power over time kyle s 1985 main results are i the informed trader trades in a gradual manner so that his information is incorporated into prices at a slow almost linear rate and ii when auctions are held continuously the depth of the market is constant over time however kyle s 1985 assumption of a single informed trader is strong in the sense that in actual financial markets it is reasonable to expect that at least a few players will have access to private information and will trade in the knowledge that they will face competition with other informed agents in the market 1 we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple strategic informed traders optimally exploit their long lived informational advantage we thus explore the restrictiveness of kyle s assumption of a single informed trader and also examine

a tale of three schools insights on autocorrelations of short horizon stock returns this article reexamines the autocorrelation patterns of short horizon stock returns we document empirical results which imply that these autocorrelations have been overstated in the existing literature based on several new insights we provide support for a market efficiency based explanation of the evidence our analysis suggests that institutional factors are the most likely source of the autocorrelation patterns

partial adjustment or stale prices implications from stock index and futures return autocorrelations we investigate the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive short horizon portfolio autocorrelations using a simple theoretical framework we generate empirical implications for both microstructure and partial adjustment models the major findings are i return autocorrelations of indices are generally positive even though futures contracts have autocorrelations close to zero and ii these autocorrelation differences are maintained under conditions favorable for spot futures arbitrage and are most prevalent during low volume periods these results point toward microstructure based explanations and away from explanations based on behavioral models

firm characteristics and analyst following abstract this paper examines the major determinants of the number of analysts following a firm a simple model of analyst following is proposed and several firm characteristics are suggested that are likely to influence the extent of a firm s analyst following by either affecting the aggregate demand for or supply of analyst services or both for the firm almost all of these characteristics are found to be strongly significant in affecting the extent of analyst following of firms and the empirical results generally accord well with economic intuition

industry information diffusion and the lead lag effect in stock returns i argue that the slow diffusion of industry information is a leading cause of the lead lag effect in stock returns i find that the lead lag effect between big firms and small firms is predominantly an intra industry phenomenon moreover this effect is driven by sluggish adjustment to negative information and is robust to alternative determinants of the lead lag effect small less competitive and neglected industries experience a more pronounced lead lag effect the lead lag effect is related to the post announcement drift of small firms following the earnings releases of big firms within the industry

a new approach for determining exchange rate level preferences in research on the political economy of exchange rates a good understanding of who will endorse and who will oppose certain exchange rate policies is central to understanding how actual exchange rate policies are made and how the global exchange rate system changes over time since existing classifications of exchange rate level preferences have several shortcomings this article proposes a new and more nuanced strategy for identifying preferences on exchange rate valuation this approach takes into account the complex interrelationship between exchange rate and monetary policy and the effects of these policies on balance sheets in addition the approach accounts for the dynamics of preference formation and change comparative case studies of currency crises in hong kong south korea thailand and taiwan show that considering actors vulnerabilities to exchange rate and interest rate changes enhances understanding of their exchange rate level preferences the case studies also indicate that societal preferences affect policy outcomes exchange rate stability was maintained in countries where private actors vulnerabilities to depreciation were high however when pressure intensified exchange rates were subsequently depreciated in countries where vulnerabilities to a monetary tightening exceeded the potential costs of depreciation

informed speculation with imperfect competition competitive rational expectations models have the unsatisfactory property dubbed the schizophrenia problem by hellwig that each trader takes the equilibrium price as given despite the fact that he influences that price an examination of information aggregation in a non competitive rational expectations model using a nash equilibrium in demand functions shows that the schizophrenia problem is avoided by having each trader take into account the effect his demand has on the equilibrium price given a distribution of private information across traders prices reveal less information than in the competition equilibrium and prices no longer become fully informative in the limit as noise trading vanishes or as traders become risk neutral with small traders the model may become one of monopolistic competition not perfect competition in contrast to the competitive model a reasonable model of endogenous acquisition of costly private information is obtained even when traders are risk neutral

the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation we develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes one key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries our approach differs from the imf official classification which we show to be only a little better than random it also differs radically from all previous attempts at historical reclassification our classification points to a rethinking of economic performance under alternative exchange rate regimes indeed the breakup of bretton woods had less impact on exchange rate regimes than is popularly believed

risk aversion market liquidity and price efficiency a model of a noncompetitive speculative market is analyzed in which privately informed traders and market makers are risk averse market liquidity is found to be nonmonotonic in the number of informed traders their degree of risk aversion and the precision of their information it is also shown that increased liquidity trading leads to reduced price efficiency and that under endogenous information acquisition market liquidity may also be nonmonotonic in the variance of liquidity trades article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

comparable firms and the precision of equity valuations abstract i investigate the relationship between the amount of information provided by a firm s comparables i e firms in the same line of business as the firm being valued and the precision of the firm s equity valuation when investors have more information previous studies argue that investors can make a more precise estimate of a firm s true equity value and this implies a lower excess stock return volatility around corporate events such as earnings announcements i develop a simple model that shows a negative relationship between the amount of information provided by a firm s comparables and the firm s stock return volatility using alternative measures of information provided by comparables and different definitions of comparables i consistently find a negative and significant relationship between these information measures and stock return volatility ceteris paribus