Equity market liberalizations are like IPOs, but they are IPOs of a country's stock market rather than of individual firms. Both are endogenous events whose benefits are limited by poor investor protection, agency costs, and information asymmetries. As for stock prices following an IPO, there...

This paper examines asset fire sales, and institutional price pressure more generally, in equity markets, using market prices of mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2003. Funds experiencing large outflows (inflows) tend to decrease (increase) existing positions, which...

I study battles between short sellers and firms. Firms use a variety of methods to impede short selling, including legal threats, investigations, lawsuits, and various technical actions intended to create a short squeeze. These actions create short sale constraints. Consistent with the...

Using complete order books from the Korea Stock Exchange for a four-year period including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, we observe (not estimate) limit order demand and supply curves for individual stocks. Both curves have demonstrably finite elasticities. These fall markedly, by about 40%,...

Stocks can be overpriced when short sale constraints bind. We study the costs of short selling equities, 1926-1933, using the publicly observable market for borrowing stock. Some stocks are sometimes expensive to short, and it appears that stocks enter the borrowing market when shorting demand...

This paper shows that the stock market downturns of 2000-2002 and 2007-09 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000's saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to corporate profits by rational investors, while the late 2000's saw a decrease in rational expectations of future...

Many questions about institutional trading can only be answered if one can track high-frequency changes in institutional ownership. In the US, however, institutions are only required to report their ownership quarterly in 13-F filings. We infer daily institutional trading behavior from the...

Do investors pay enough attention to long-term fundamentals? We consider the case of demographic information. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life insurance, and nursing homes. These demand changes are...

This paper investigates the dynamic relation between market-wide trading activity and returns in 46 markets. Many stock markets exhibit a strong positive relation between turnover and past returns. These findings stand up in the face of various controls for volatility, alternative definitions...

This paper studies the performance of a large number of anomalies after accounting for transaction costs, and the effectiveness of several transaction cost mitigation strategies. It finds that introducing a buy/hold spread, which allows investors to continue to hold stocks that they would not...