A firm’s announcement that it intends to restructure based on tracking stock is usually associated with a positive stock price reaction, at least in the short run. Typically, this reaction is attributed to expected reductions in a diversification discount, through reduced agency costs or information asymmetries. We reinvestigate this latter hypothesis by focusing on the liquidity provided by ma...

We show whether central clearing of a particular class of derivatives lowers counterparty risk. For plausible cases, adding a central clearing counterparty (CCP) for a class of derivatives such as credit default swaps reduces netting efficiency, leading to an increase in average exposure to counterparty default. Further, clearing different classes of derivatives in separate CCPs always increase...

Recent empirical research in finance has uncovered two families of pervasive regularities: underreaction of stock prices to news such as earnings announcements, and overreaction of stock prices to a series of good or bad news. In this paper, we present a parsimonious model of investor sentiment, or of how investors form beliefs, which is consistent with the empirical findings. The model is base...

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...

Financial press reports claim that internet stock message boards can move markets. We study the effect of more than 1.5 million messages posted on Yahoo! Finance and Raging Bull about the 45 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Dow Jones Internet Index. The bullishness of the messages is measured using computational linguistics methods. News stories reported in the Wall Street...

During 1999-2001 more than 35 million messages about public firms were posted on Yahoo! Finance. This paper examines whether stocks with high posting levels also have unusual subsequent returns and/or risk. They do. Stocks with the highest level of posting have unusually high realized volatility and unusually poor subsequent returns. This remains true after accounting for the effects of the mar...

This paper proposes that bank runs are unique equilibrium outcomes instead of self-fulfilling prophecies. By assuming that depositors make their withdrawal decisions sequentially, the model provides an equilibrium-selection mechanism in the economy. A bank run would occur if and only if depositors perceive a low return on bank assets. Furthermore, a panic situation arises only when the market i...

We argue that arbitrage is limited if rational traders face uncertainty about when their peers will exploit a common arbitrage opportunity. This synchronization risk—which is distinct from noise trader risk and fundamental risk—arises in our model because arbitrageurs become sequentially aware of mispricing and they incur holding costs. We show that rational arbitrageurs ‘‘time the market’’ rat...

In this paper we provide empirical findings on the significance of positive feedback trading for the return behavior in the German stock market. Relying on the ShillerSentana-Wadhwani model, we use the link between index return auto-correlation and volatility to obtain a better understanding into the return characteristics generated by traders adhering to positive feedback trading strategies. O...

Motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, we model investors’ attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset-price dynamics. We show that limited investor attention leads to category-learning behavior, i.e., investors tend to process more market and sector-wide information than firm-specific information. This endogenous structure...