Many explanations for home or local bias rely on information asymmetry: investors know more about their home assets. A criticism of these theories is that asymmetry should disappear when information is tradable. This criticism is flawed. If investors have asymmetric prior beliefs, but choose how to allocate limited learning capacity before investing, they will not necessarily learn foreign info...

In this study, we explore whether Wikipedia plays a governance role in the financial market by reducing the information disadvantage of individual investors. We hypothesize that the aggregation of information on Wikipedia enables individual investors to collectively monitor insiders and institutional investors. Using the creation of a firm Wikipedia page as an information event, our empirical r...

We study how the relationship between a firm’s growth opportunities and its dividend policies shifts in response to reduction information asymmetry investors firms. Existing literature suggests negative payouts presence of asymmetry. Using mandatory adoption IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) as an exogenous shock environment firm, we document that payout strengthens. This impro...

Several studies measuring the flow of monies into and out of U.S. mutual funds note a convexity in the performance-flow relation and offer several explanations for the apparent investor insensitivity to poor performance. In this study investor response to past performance is measured in a different setting: the Australian wholesale funds market. The results confirm that, like the U.S. mutual fu...

This paper studies herding behavior of institutional investors in international markets. First, we document the existence of wide-spread herding in 41 countries (referred to as ‘‘target countries’’ hereafter) in the sample. We then examine the relation between contemporaneous institutional demand and future returns and find that institutional herding stabilizes prices. Next, we examine the rela...

This paper presents a dynamic asset-pricing model under asymmetric information. Investors have different information concerning the future growth rate of dividends. They rationally extract information from prices as well as dividends and maximize their expected utility. The model has a closed-form solution to the rational expectations equilibrium. We find that existence of uninformed investors ...

We present numerical approximations of optimal portfolios in mispriced Lévy markets under asymmetric information for informed and uninformed investors having logarithmic preference. We apply our numerical scheme to Kou (2002) jump-diffusion markets by deriving analytic formulas for the first two derivatives of the underlying portfolio objective function which depend only on the Lévy measure of ...

This study explores how trading constraints such as borrowing and short-sale constraints affect asset prices in the presence of asymmetric information. In a symmetric information environment, borrowing and short-sale constraints exacerbate downward and upward price movements, respectively. However, in the presence of information asymmetry, the price impact of each constraint is different. In an...

Whether the information environment affects the cost of capital is a fundamental question in accounting and finance research. Relying on theories about competition between informed investors as well as the pricing of information asymmetry, we hypothesize a cross-sectional variation in the pricing of information asymmetry that is conditional on competition. We develop and validate empirical prox...