We test the no-trade theorem in a laboratory financial market where subjects can trade an asset whose value is unknown. Subjects receive clues on the asset value and then set a bid and an ask at which they are willing to buy or to sell from the other participants. In treatments with no gains from trade, we should observe no trading activity, whereas, in treatments with gains, trade becomes theo...

This paper develops a model of information acquisition and portfolio choice under short-sale constraints. We show that short-sale constraints reduce information acquisition and both the constraints on short-selling and the reduced information acquisition affect investment decisions. The effects of short-sale constraints on investment decisions and asset prices are driven largely by the effects ...

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is adjusted to allow rational informational herding and contrarianism. While herding and contrarianism did no...

We estimate an empirical model of consumption disasters using new data on consumption for 24 countries over more than 100 years, and study its implications for asset prices. The model allows for partial recoveries after disasters that unfold over multiple years. We find that roughly half of the drop in consumption due to disasters is subsequently reversed. Our model generates a sizable equity p...

Food commodity price fluctuations have an important impact on poverty and food insecurity across the world. Conventional models have not provided a complete picture of recent price spikes in agricultural commodity markets, while there is an urgent need for appropriate policy responses. Perhaps new approaches are needed in order to better understand international spill-overs, the feedback betwee...

We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyeror seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When measured annually, small trade order imbalance forecasts future returns; stocks heavily bought underperform ...

The profitability of chartist trading rules on foreign exchange markets is still under debate. Since simple technical trading rules may not adequately capture the complex phenomenon of chartist trading, this paper focuses on the prominent head-and-shoulder pattern as a representative trading rule which incorporates various „technical“ ideas such as smoothed trends, trend reversal, resistance le...

This paper offers an explanation for stock market crashes which focuses on the role of rational but uninformed traders. We show that uninformed traders can precipitate a price crash because as prices decline, they surmise that informed traders received negative information, which leads them to reduce their demand for assets and drive the price of stocks even lower. The model yields several impl...

This paper tests whether traders react more strongly as a series of similar earnings surprises continues, as predicted by several important behavioral finance models. We compile measures of buying and selling from NYSE TAQ data for a large ten-year sample. Results show strong, consistent, evidence that small traders exhibit an increasing reaction – with significant increases in reaction strengt...

Recently, stock exchanges have altered their trading fees to subsidize liquidity by offering “make” rebates for providing liquidity through limit orders and charging “take” fees for consuming liquidity via marketable orders, leading to debate regarding the impact of these fees on market quality. Using an exogenous experiment performed by NASDAQ in 2015, I employ difference-in-differences analys...