Financial innovation has increased diversification opportunities and lowered investment costs, but has not reduced the relative cost of active (informed) investment strategies relative to passive (less informed) strategies. What are the consequences? I study an economy with linear production technologies, some more risky than others. Investors can use low quality public information or collect h...

This paper develops a sequential random matching model of asset trading to analyze how the extent of information about an asset that is available in the market can affect its tradeability. Liquidity traders are rational agents with higher impatience, which make optimal intertemporal consumption decisions given the trading constraints. Information asymmetries result in unexecuted trades. Agents ...

This paper investigates the performance of hedge funds adjusted for higher order risk factors. Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures are subject to size distorted in the presence of skewness and kurtosis. A residual augmented least squares approach to model higher order risk moments in returns allows us to estimate a robust risk-adjusted performance measure for hedge funds. In a compar...

This paper provides evidence that “illusory correlations,” a well-documented source of cognitive bias, leads some agents to be imperfectly rational noise traders. We identify illusory correlations by focusing on the head-and-shoulders chart pattern. Though this is considered one of the most reliable technical trading signals, our evidence indicates that the signal does not profitably predict di...

This paper studies the implications for monetary policy of heterogeneous expectations in a New Keynesian model. The assumption of rational expectations is replaced with parsimonious forecasting models where agents select between predictors that are underparameterized. In a Misspecification Equilibrium agents only select the best-performing statistical models. We demonstrate that, even when mone...

This paper investigates how and to what extent institutional development influences and permits firm-specific information to be incorporated into share prices, as measured by stock price synchronicity. Tracing the experience of China, an economy undergoing dramatic changes in the last 20 years with rich variation in experiences across provinces, this paper reveals that stock price synchronicity...

During financial crises equity portfolios have suffered large losses. Methodologies for portfolio selection taking into account the possibility of large losses have existed for decades but their economic value is not well established. This article investigates the economic value in reducing the probability of large losses in portfolio selection. We combine mean-variance analysis with semi-param...

We analyze the impact of news (information shocks) in economies where liquidity plays a role. While we also consider news about real factors, like productivity, one motivation is that central bank announcements evidently affect markets, as taken for granted by advocates of forward guidance policy. The dynamic effects can be complicated, with information about monetary policy or real factors aff...

Using intra-day data, this paper investigates the contribution to the price discovery of Euro and Japanese Yen exchange rates in three foreign exchange markets based on electronic trading systems: the CME GLOBEX regular futures, E-mini futures, and the EBS interdealer spot market. Contrary to evidence in equity markets and more recent evidence in foreign exchange markets, the spot market is fou...

This paper examines the relationship between the board structure of UK firms and the accuracy of individual analysts’ earnings forecasts with respect to information asymmetry and agency theory. We hypothesize that managers of firms complying with the recommendations of The Code of Best Practice may have “less to hide” and, subsequently, provide more information to outsiders (including analysts)...