information acquisition and under diversification if an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests which assets should he learn about the best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold but the assets the investor holds depend on the information he observes we build a framework to solve jointly for investment and information choices with general preferences and information cost functions although the optimal research strategies depend on preferences and costs the main result is that the investor who can first collect information systematically deviates from holding a diversified portfolio information acquisition can rationalize investing in a diversified fund and a concentrated set of assets an allocation often observed but usually deemed anomalous copyright wiley blackwell

when transparency improves must prices reflect fundamentals better no in the presence of speculative opportunities investors can learn about both asset fundamentals and the beliefs of other traders we show that this learning exhibits complementarity learning more along one dimension increases the value of learning about the other as a result regulatory changes may be counterproductive first increasing transparency i e making fundamental information cheaper to acquire can make prices less informative when investors respond by learning relatively more about others second public disclosures discourage private learning about fundamentals while encouraging information acquisition about others accordingly disclosing more fundamental information can decrease overall informational efficiency by decreasing price informativeness received april 20 2016 editorial decision september 30 2017 by editor itay goldstein

speculation and hedging in segmented markets 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 adding more informed traders may reduce price informativeness and therefore provides a source for learning complementarities leading to multiple equilibria and price jumps our model is relevant to various realistic settings and helps to understand a variety of modern financial markets

investor flows and the 2008 boom bust in oil prices this paper explores the impact of investor flows and financial market conditions on returns in crude oil futures markets i argue that informational frictions and the associated speculative activity may induce prices to drift away from fundamental values and may result in price booms and busts particular attention is given to the interplay between imperfect information about real economic activity including supply demand and inventory accumulation and speculative activity in oil markets furthermore i present new evidence that there were economically and statistically significant effects of investor flows on futures prices after controlling for returns in the united states and emerging economy stock markets a measure of the balance sheet flexibility of large financial institutions open interest the futures spot basis and lagged returns on oil futures the largest impacts on futures prices were from intermediate term growth rates of index positions and managed money spread positions moreover my findings suggest that these effects were through risk or informational channels distinct from changes in convenience yield finally the evidence suggests that hedge fund trading in spread positions in futures impacted the shape of term structure of oil futures prices this paper was accepted by wei xiong finance

complementarities multiplicity and supply information if traders can obtain private information about the payoff and the supply of a stock then there can exist i complementarity in information acquisition and ii multiple equilibria in the financial and information markets the additional dimension of supply information increases coordination possibilities in the financial market leading to multiple equilibria the existence of two information sources can lead to information acquisition being complementary the multiplicity of equilibria is suggestive of excess volatility and crashes the different financial market equilibria imply differing patterns of cost of capital and volume of trade 2009 by the european economic association

trying to explain home bias in equities and consumption investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest a phenomenon called equity home bias in the absence of this bias investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities therefore consumption growth rates would tend to co move across countries even when output growth rates do not empirically however consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates a phenomenon i call consumption home bias in this paper i discuss these two biases and their potential relationship as suggested by the literature

security analysis and trading patterns when some investors receive information before others in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time this article analyzes trading behavior and equilibrium information acquisition when some investors receive common private information before others the model implies that under some conditions investors will focus only on a subset of securities herding while neglecting other securities with identical exogenous characteristics in addition the model is consistent with empirical correlations that are suggestive of oft cited trading strategies such as profit taking short term position reversal and following the leader mimicking earlier trades in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time while these models provide many important insights in reality some investors either fortuitously or owing to superior skill acquire pertinent information before others by being first an investor can exploit this information to great advantage information that is uncovered only slightly later is less valuable even if it has not yet been publicly revealed we show in this article that the sequential nature of information arrival has a significant effect on both the trading decisions and the types of information collected by investors the model we develop describes the investment choices of a set of competitive risk averse investors who investigate the long term prospects of firms lucky or high ability investors uncover the

financial market innovation and security design an introduction abstract the article describes in the context of theory and practice this special issue of the journal of economic theory on financial market innovation and security design the main focus is on security design in incomplete financial markets possibly with asymmetrically informed traders we first survey the general equilibrium literature which emphasizes the spanning role of securities we then provide a unified framework encompassing the literature that employs a cara guassian setting to study the impact of financial innovation on risk sharing and information aggregation journal of economic literature classification numbers g10 d52

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

agency and optimal investment dynamics agency problems limit firms access to capital markets curbing investment firms and investors seek contractual ways to mitigate these problems what are the implications for investment we present a theory of a firm s investment dynamics in the presence of agency problems and optimal long term financial contracts we derive results relating firms investment decisions current and past cash flows firm size capital structure and dividends among the results optimal investment is increasing in current and past cash flow and optimal investment is positively serially correlated over time after controlling for investment opportunities these results hold for a range of agency problems jel g30 g31 g32 g35 d82 d86 d92 copyright 2007 oxford university press

how are derivatives used evidence from the mutual fund industry we investigate investment managers use of derivatives by comparing return distributions for equity mutual funds that use and do not use derivatives in contrast to public perception derivative users have risk exposure and return performance that are similar to nonusers we also analyze changes in fund risk in response to prior fund performance changes in risk are substantially less severe for funds using derivatives consistent with the explanation that managers use derivatives to reduce the impact of performance on risk we provide new evidence regarding the implications of cash flows and managerial gaming for the relation between performance and risk

entrepreneurial finance and nondiversifiable risk w e develop a dynamic incomplete markets model of entrepreneurial firms and demonstrate the implications of nondiversifiable risks for entrepreneurs interdependent consumption portfolio allocation financing investment and business exit decisions we characterize the optimal capital structure via a generalized tradeoff model where risky debt provides significant diversification benefits nondiversifiable risks have several important implications more risk averse entrepreneurs default earlier but choose higher leverage lack of diversification causes entrepreneurial firms to underinvest relative to public firms and risky debt partially alleviates this problem and entrepreneurial risk aversion can overturn the risk shifting incentives induced by risky debt we also analytically characterize the idiosyncratic risk premium jel g11 g31 e20

rational asset price movements without news this paper argues that an important part of movements in asset prices may be caused by neither external news nor irrationality but by the revelation of information by the trading process itself two models are developed that illustrate this general idea one model is based on investor uncertainty about the quality of other investors information the other is based on dispersion of information and small costs to trading the analysis is used to suggest a possible rational explanation of the october 1987 crash copyright 1993 by american economic association

asymmetric price movements and borrowing constraints a rational expectations equilibrium model of crises contagion and confusion this study proposes a rational expectations equilibrium model of crises and contagion in an economy with information asymmetry and borrowing constraints consistent with empirical observations the model finds 1 crises can be caused by small shocks to fundamentals 2 market return distributions are asymmetric and 3 correlations among asset returns tend to increase during crashes the model also predicts 1 crises and contagion are likely to occur after small shocks in the intermediate price region 2 the skewness of asset price distributions increases with information asymmetry and borrowing constraints and 3 crises can spread through investor borrowing constraints

risk futures pricing and the organization of production in commodity markets this paper examines equilibrium in a spot and futures market with both primary producers growers and intermediate producers processors for a commodity that is subject to output shocks processors tend to hedge long in contrast with hick s theory of futures hedging nevertheless if transaction costs are low the two stage production process brings about a downward futures price bias consistent with hick s pricing prediction but if costs of trading futures are high growers tend to be differentially driven from the futures market reversing the direction of the bias futures trading may also affect the organization of industry when demand is inelastic futures trading can serve as a substitute for vertical integration as a means of diversifying risk because the risk positions of growers are complementary with those of processors

information markets and the comovement of asset prices traditional asset pricing models predict that covariance between prices of difierent assets should be lower than what we observe in the data this model generates high covariance within a rational expectations framework by introducing markets for information about asset payofis when information is costly rational investors will not buy information about all assets they will learn about a subset because information production has high flxed costs competitive producers charge more for low demand information than for high demand information a price that declines in quantity makes investors want to purchase a common subset of information if investors price many assets using a common subset of information then a shock to one signal is passed on as a common shock to many asset prices these common shocks to asset prices generate excess covariance the cross sectional and time series properties of asset price covariance are consistent with this explanation

synthetic or real the equilibrium effects of credit default swaps on bond markets we provide a model of nonredundant credit default swaps cdss building on the observation that cdss have lower trading costs than bonds cds introduction involves a trade off it crowds out existing demand for the bond but improves the bond allocation by allowing long term investors to become levered basis traders and absorb more of the bond supply we characterize conditions under which cds introduction raises bond prices the model predicts a negative cds bond basis as well as turnover and price impact patterns that are consistent with empirical evidence we also show that a ban on naked cdss can raise borrowing costs

information acquisition price informativeness and welfare abstract we consider the market for a risky asset with heterogeneous valuations private information that agents have about their own valuation is reflected in the equilibrium price we study the learning externalities that arise in this setting and in particular their implications for price informativeness and welfare when private signals are noisy so that agents rely more on the information conveyed by prices discouraging information gathering may be pareto improving complementarities in information acquisition can lead to multiple equilibria

financial markets with trade on risk and return in this paper i develop a model in which risk averse investors possess private information regarding both a stock s expected payoff and its risk these investors trade in the stock and a derivative whose payoff is driven by the stock s risk in equilibrium the derivative is used to speculate on the stock s risk and to hedge against adverse fluctuations in the stock s risk i analyze the derivative price and variance risk premium that arise in this equilibrium and their predictive power for stock returns finally i examine the relationship between prices and trading volume in the stock and derivative received july 31 2017 editorial decision december 3 2018 by editor stijn van nieuwerburgh authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

information immobility and the home bias puzzle many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can but why does global information access not eliminate this asymmetry we model investors endowed with a small home information advantage who choose what information to learn before they invest surprisingly even when home investors can learn what foreigners know they choose not to investors profit more from knowing information others do not know learning amplifies information asymmetry the model matches patterns of local and industry bias foreign investments portfolio outperformance and asset prices finally we propose new avenues for empirical research

contract renegotiation and coasian dynamics consider a long term relationship between a seller and a buyer whose valuation for a per period service or a durable good is private as trade progresses the valuation will be partially revealed and it may be impossible for the parties to commit ex ante not to take advantage of this we analyse this situation first by supposing that the parties can sign a sequence of short term contracts and secondly by supposing that they can sign a long term contract but cannot commit not to renegotiate it later we find a close relationship in the second case between the optimal long term contract and the non commitment outcome in the standard coasian durable good model our results also have implications for hidden information principal agent models

market frictions and the pricing of sovereign credit default swaps abstract this paper contributes to the general understanding of how sovereign cds prices are formed by studying the information content of pricing errors generated by a non arbitrage model we implement a price discrepancy measure in the spirit of the noise measure introduced by hu et al 2013 in the treasury bond market and analyze its main determinants in panel data analysis the main results show that sovereign cds pricing errors are systematically related to higher bid ask spreads the evidence in this paper also suggests that exits of capital arbitrage during distressed periods as measured by changes in net offsetting can be associated to larger pricing errors in sovereign cds from advanced economies thereby supporting the main claims of the limit to arbitrage theories these findings are robust for the most common cds pricing models employed in the industry and different estimation techniques

the speed of information revelation in a financial market mechanism abstract the paper studies the rate at which dispersed private information about the value v of a risky financial asset is incorporated into prices in an information adjustment mechanism the mechanism in the presence of competitive market makers aggregates the information of risk averse agents at a rate of n 1 2 where n is the number of rounds of the adjustment process without market makers convergence of prices to v is much slower in any case the asymptotic precision of prices is negatively related to the degree of risk aversion and the amount of noise in the system journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 g14

a theory of financing constraints and firm dynamics there is widespread evidence supporting the conjecture that borrowing constraints have important implications for firm growth and survival in this paper we model a multiperiod borrowing lending relationship with asymmetric information we show that borrowing constraints emerge as a feature of the optimal long term lending contract and that such constraints relax as the value of the borrower s claim to future cash flows increases we also show that the optimal contract has interesting implications for firm dynamics in agreement with the empirical evidence as age and size increase mean and variance of growth decrease and firm survival increases

information tradeoffs in dynamic financial markets abstract in dynamic financial markets the stochastic supply of risky assets has a significant informational role contrary to static models where it acts as noise in dynamic markets stochastic supply contains information about risk premiums acquiring private dividend information helps investors disentangle dividend information from discount rate information contained in prices for uninformed investors however as more informed investors enter the economy prices become more informative about dividends but less informative about discount rates this tradeoff creates complementarities in information acquisition and multiple equilibria in the information market

information acquisition in financial markets tions agents have exponential utility and random variables are normally distributed these assumptions are often necessary to obtain closed form solutions we present an example with alternative assumptions and demonstrate that some of the conclusions from previous literature fail to hold in particular we show that in our example as more agents acquire information prices do not necessarily become more informative and agents may have greater incentive to acquire informatioln learning can therefore be a strategic complement allowing for the possibility of multiple equilibria

convertible bond arbitrage liquidity externalities and stock prices abstract in the context of convertible bond issuance we examine the impact of arbitrage activity on underlying equity markets in particular we use changes in equity short interest following convertible bond issuance to identify convertible bond arbitrage activity and analyze its impact on stock market liquidity and prices for the period 1993 to 2006 there is considerable evidence of arbitrage induced short selling resulting from issuance moreover we find strong evidence that this activity is systematically related to liquidity improvements in the stock these results are robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of arbitrage activity

manipulation and the allocational role of prices it is commonly believed that prices in secondary financial markets play an important allocational role because they contain information that facilitates the efficient allocation of resources this paper identifies a limitation inherent in this role of prices it shows that the presence of a feedback effect from the financial market to the real value of a firm creates an incentive for an uninformed trader to sell the firm s stock when this happens the informativeness of the stock price decreases and the beneficial allocational role of the financial market weakens the trader profits from this trading strategy partly because his trading distorts the firm s investment we therefore refer to this strategy as manipulation we show that trading without information is profitable only with sell orders driving a wedge between the allocational implications of buyer and seller initiated speculation and providing justification for restrictions on short sales

presidential address asset price dynamics with slow moving capital i describe asset price dynamics caused by the slow movement of investment capital to trading opportunities the pattern of price responses to supply or demand shocks typically involves a sharp reaction to the shock and a subsequent and more extended reversal the amplitude of the immediate price impact and the pattern of the subsequent recovery can reflect institutional impediments to immediate trade such as search costs for trading counterparties or time to raise capital by intermediaries i discuss special impediments to capital formation during the recent financial crisis that caused asset price distortions which subsided afterward after presenting examples of price reactions to supply shocks in normal market settings i offer a simple illustrative model of price dynamics associated with slow moving capital due to the presence of inattentive investors i address the implications for asset price dynamics of the apparent slow movement of investment capital to trading opportunities the arrival of new capital to an investment opportunity can be delayed by fractions of a second in some markets for example an electronic limit order book market for equities or by months in other markets such as that for catastrophe risk insurance accordingly prices respond to supply or demand shocks with a sharp reaction because of the relatively small subset of capital and thus risk bearing capacity that is immediately available to absorb a shock on short notice such a price impact is substantially reversed over time as additional capital becomes available the amplitude of the immediate price impact and the pattern of the subsequent recovery can reflect many sorts of attention costs to trade as well as institutional impediments to capital movement such as search costs for trading

multimarket trading and market liquidity when a security trades at multiple locations simultaneously an informed trader has several avenues in which to exploit his private information the greater the proportion of liquidity trading by large traders who can split their trades across markets the larger is the correlation between volume in different markets and the smaller is the informativeness of prices we show that one of the markets emerges as the dominant location for trading in that security when informed traders can use their information for more than one trading period the timely release of price information by market makers at one location adversely affects the profits informed traders expect to make subsequently at other locations market makers competing to offer the lowest cost of trading at their location consequently deter informed trading be voluntarily making the price information public and by cracking down on insider trading article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

informed trading investment and welfare this article studies the welfare economics of informed stock market trading we analyze the effect of more informative prices on investment given that this dependence will itself be reflected in equilibrium prices while a higher incidence of informed speculation always increases firm value through a more informative trading process the effect on agents welfare depends on how revelation of information changes risk sharing opportunities in the market greater revelation of information that agents wish to insure against reduces their hedging opportunities on the other hand early revelation of information that is uncorrelated with hedging needs allows agents to construct better hedges