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...

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...

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 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...

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)...

Technical traders base their analysis on the premise that the patterns in market prices are assumed to recur in the future, and thus, these patterns can be used for predictive purposes. This paper uses the daily Dow Jones Industrial Average Index from 1897 to 1988 to examine the linear and nonlinear predictability of stock market returns with simple technical trading rules. The nonlinear specif...

Asset prices observed in financial markets combine equilibrium prices and market microstructure noise. In this paper, we study how to tell apart large shifts in equilibrium prices from noise using high frequency data. We propose a new nonparametric test which allows us to asymptotically remove the noise from observable price data and to discover jumps in fundamental asset values. We provide its...

Open-market repurchases reduce the supply of a stock’s shares in the market. Japanese stock repurchase data allows us to successfully isolate the supply effect from information effects of the stock repurchase. We focus on stock price behavior during the actual repurchase period when no new information is released and find that the excess stock returns are significantly positive only during actu...