On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

If experimental subjects arbitrage against market interest rates when making intertemporal allocations of cash, the data will reveal nothing about subjects' discount rates, only uncovering subjects' market interest rates. If they frame choices narrowly, market rates will not be salient and the...

Classic public choice skepticism about the regulatory state, based on theories of rent-seeking, rent extraction and regulatory capture, is based on the unrealistic, and usually unstated, assumption of a monopolist regulator. In practice, the regulatory state is polycentric, involving numerous...

In the context of a general semimartingale model of a complete market, we aim at answering the following question: How much is an investor willing to pay for learning some inside information that allows to achieve arbitrage? If such a value exists, we call it the value of informational...

A relatively new activist investor strategy is to purchase shares in the acquirer after an M&A announcement and exercise shareholder rights to change deal terms, or even to block the deal, through public campaigns. We provide new evidence on how the strategy affects target firms and activists'...

Prior literature examines the effect of either informed or arbitrage short selling on equity markets. We test the relative importance of informed and uninformed short selling around convertible bond issues and earnings announcements for the same firms over the same time period. Convertible...

We present a methodology for estimating a 3-regime threshold vector error correction model (TVECM) with an unknown cointegrating vector based on a new dynamic grid evaluation. This model is particularly suited to estimating deviations from parity conditions such as unknown arbitrage costs in...

We analyse the operational effects of market participants responding to price incentives for spillage and shortage positions in a single price, electricity balancing market. We consider optimal real-time decisions by generators and speculators based upon forecasts of the conditional distribution...

We model the returns of the convertible arbitrage strategy using a non-linear framework. This strategy has generated long periods of positive returns and low volatility, followed by shorter periods of extreme negative returns and high volatility, associated with market upheaval. We specify a...

We evaluate the over-valuation hypothesis and merger arbitrage price pressure hypothesis as potential explanations for the observed negative returns to stock acquirers around merger announcement. Using daily shorting flow data, we show that the majority of the negative announcement returns can...