Motivated by the recent debate on return R2 as an information-efficiency measure, this paper proposes and examines a new hypothesis that R2 is related to investors' biases in processing information. We provide a model to show that R2 decreases with the degree of the marginal investor's...

In 2005-08, over a dozen put warrants traded in China went so deep out of the money that they were almost certain to expire worthless. Nonetheless, each warrant was traded more than three time each day at substantially inflated prices. This bubble is unique in that the underlying stock prices...

We argue that the root cause behind the recent corporate scandals associated with CEO pay is the technology bubble of the latter half of the 1990s. Far from rejecting the optimal incentive contracting theory of executive compensation, the recent evidence on executive pay can be reconciled with...

We present a multiperiod agency model of stock based executive compensation in a speculative stock market, where investors are overconfident and stock prices may deviate from underlying fundamentals and include a speculative option component. This component arises from the option to sell the...

Firms commonly spread out their debt expirations across time to reduce the liquidity risk generated by large quantities of debt expiring at the same time. By doing so, they introduce a dynamic coordination problem. In deciding whether to rollover his debt, each maturing creditor is concerned...

One of the most striking portfolio puzzles is the disposition effect: the tendency of individuals to sell stocks in their portfolios that have risen in value since purchase, rather than fallen in value. Perhaps the most prominent explanation for this puzzle is based on prospect theory. Despite...

Motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, we model investors' attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset-price dynamics. We show that limited investor attention leads to category-learning behavior, i.e., investors tend to...

The market dynamics of technology stocks in the late nineties has stimulated a growing body of theories that analyze the joint effects of short-sales constraints and heterogeneous beliefs on stock prices and trading volume. This paper examines implications of these theories using a unique data...

We model the relationship between float (the tradable shares of an asset) and stock price bubbles. Investors trade a stock that initially has a limited float because of insider lock-up restrictions but the tradable shares of which increase over time as these restrictions expire. A speculative...

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. The heterogeneous expectations cause agents to take speculative positions against each other and therefore generate endogenous relative...