Essays on Financial Market Imperfections

This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial market imperfections, in particular, information imperfections. Chapter 1 studies how the existence of a fixed cost per transaction faced by uninformed investors hampers information revelation through price and exacerbates adverse selection. The exacerbated adverse selection explains one long-standing puzzle in finance the momentum anomaly. Properly adjusting stock returns for adverse selection by using data on trading volume substantially mitigates momentum-based arbitrage profits for the sample period from 1983 to 2004. Chapter 2 studies how information asymmetry prevents perfect risk-sharing and offers insights on stock return behavior. Chapter 3 explores the idea of Tobin's tax in the context of an emerging market and in particular examines the cost effects on speculation in the Chinese stock market. Thesis Supervisor: Olivier J. Blanchard Title: Class of 1941 Professor of Economics Thesis Supervisor: Jiang Wang Title: Mizuho Professor of Finance Essays on Financial Market Imperfections by Ding Wu Submitted to the Department of Economics on 15 May 2007, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics Abstract This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial market imperfections, in particular, information imperfections. Chapter 1 studies how the existence of a fixed cost per transaction faced by uninformed investors hampers information revelation through price and exacerbates adverse selection. The exacerbated adverse selection explains one long-standing puzzle in finance the momentum anomaly. Properly adjusting stock returns for adverse selection by using data on trading volume substantially mitigates momentum-based arbitrage profits for the sample period from 1983 to 2004. Chapter 2 studies how information asymmetry prevents perfect risk-sharing and offers insights on stock return behavior. Chapter 3 explores the idea of Tobin's tax in the context of an emerging market and in particular examines the cost effects on speculation in the Chinese stock market.This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial market imperfections, in particular, information imperfections. Chapter 1 studies how the existence of a fixed cost per transaction faced by uninformed investors hampers information revelation through price and exacerbates adverse selection. The exacerbated adverse selection explains one long-standing puzzle in finance the momentum anomaly. Properly adjusting stock returns for adverse selection by using data on trading volume substantially mitigates momentum-based arbitrage profits for the sample period from 1983 to 2004. Chapter 2 studies how information asymmetry prevents perfect risk-sharing and offers insights on stock return behavior. Chapter 3 explores the idea of Tobin's tax in the context of an emerging market and in particular examines the cost effects on speculation in the Chinese stock market.