I develop a model of bilateral conversations in which players honestly exchange ideas with their competitors. The key to incentive compatibility is a complementarity in the information structure: a player can only generate a new insight if he has access to his counterpart’s previous...

Theory suggests that, in the presence of local bias, the price of a stock should be decreasing in the ratio of the aggregate book value of firms in its region to the aggregate risk tolerance of investors in its region. Using data on U.S. states and Census regions, we find clear-cut support for...

A large catalog of variables with no apparent connection to risk has been shown to forecast stock returns, both in the time series and the cross-section. For instance, we see medium-term momentum and post-earnings drift in returns—the tendency for stocks that have had unusually high past...

We develop a model in which a firm can devote effort either to increasing sales growth, or to improving per-unit profit margins. If the firm's manager cares about the current stock price, she will favor the growth strategy when the market pays more attention to growth numbers. Conversely, it can...

We develop a model that clarifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of academic and private-sector research. Rather than relying on lack of appropriability or spillovers to generate a rationale for academic research, we emphasize control-rights considerations, and argue that the...

The authors develop a pair of models that illustrate how imperfections in transfunctional mechanisms can lead to a market crash. Neither market orders nor limit orders allow traders to condition their demands on the full information set needed to achieve a Walrasian outcome. When volume shocks...

This paper examines the familiar argument that takeover pressure can be damaging because it leads managers to sacrifice long-term interests in order to boost current profits. If stockholders are imperfectly informed, temporarily low earnings may cause the stock to become undervalued, increasing...

Introducing more speculators into the market for a given commodity leads to improved risk sharing but can also change the informational content of prices. This inflicts an externality on those traders already in the market, whose ability to make inferences based on current prices will be...

This article addresses the following basic capital budgeting problem: suppose that cross-sectional differences in stock returns can be predicted based on variables other than P(e.g., book-to-market) and that this predictability reflects market irrationality rather than compensation for...