In 1996, the first exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to track a subset of the Morgan Stanley Capital International country indices were approved under the name World Equity Benchmarks (acronym "WEBS"(TM)). We examine the impact of early WEBS-trading on the liquidity of corresponding...

We develop a new methodology that controls for both the timing of annual earnings news (Asquith et al., 1989) and the performance prior to split announcements (Barber and Lyon, 1996) to evaluate the information content of stock splits. In contrast to existing evidence, we find that stock splits...

We study the price effects of firms added to and deleted from the Samp;P 500 index and document an asymmetric price response: there is a permanent increase in the price of added firms but no similar decline for deleted firms. These results are at odds with extant explanations of the effects of...

We study the price effects of firms added to and deleted from the Samp;P 500 index and document an asymmetric price response: there is a permanent increase in the price of added firms but no similar decline for deleted firms. These results are at odds with extant explanations of the effects of...

The use of short sales by mutual funds has increased significantly over the last decade. In this paper, we provide a first look at short selling by mutual funds, a phenomenon not examined by prior research. The mutual funds that use short sales do so frequently and in significant amounts,...