This paper examines the recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries in order to gain insights into the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed as efforts to recover from negative income shocks through risk pooling and transfer. Specific examples of public-privat...

This paper presents an overview of how single stock futures (SSF) have developed since their introduction in the United States. We present a number of reasons why individual investor interest in SSF may not have reached its potential. Individual investors should note SSF volumes are very low and implied interest rates indicate that SSF settlement prices often have little relation to their respe...

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 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 ...

We examine how insiders and firms trade when arbitrage is limited. When arbitrage is costly (proxied by high idiosyncratic risk), insiders and firms earn higher absolute returns on their trades (insider trading, share repurchases, and seasoned equity offerings) in the following year. Furthermore, they initiate their trades following greater past price movements in the preceding year. These resu...

The consensus wisdom of active mutual fund managers, as reflected in their average overand underweighting decisions, contains valuable information about future stock returns. Analyzing a comprehensive sample of active U.S. equity funds 1984—2008, we find that stocks heavily overweighted by active funds outperform their underweighted counterparts by more than 7% per year, after adjustments for t...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

This paper studies a discrete-time financial model with or without transaction costs, in which only partial information can be observed. Partial information model means that the investors in the market can observe no more information except the stock prices. This model has been investigated in Karatzas and Xue (1991), Lakner (1995, 1998), and Cheng (2004), etc. Applying stochastic filtering the...

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 mo...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information about future earnings that is unrelated to current earnings. In response to good advance information, stock prices increase and informed investors act as trend chasers, increasing their inve...