Recent studies of conditional factor models do not specify conditioning information but use data from small windows to estimate the time series of conditional alphas and betas. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric method using an optimal window to estimate time-varying coefficients. In...

We analyze a model where the value of a traded security is affected by two different fundamentals, e.g., the quality of the firm's technology and the demand for its products, and where there are two groups of informed traders, each one informed about a different fundamental. We analyze the...

We study the real-efficiency implications of public information in a model where relevant decision makers learn from the financial market to guide their actions. Whether disclosure is "good" or "bad" depends on the interactions between two effects on real decision makers' forecast. Disclosure...

We study a model to explore the (dis)connect between market efficiency and real efficiency when real decision makers learn information from the market to guide their actions. We emphasize two channels that determine whether the two efficiency concepts are aligned. The "externality channel" says...

Various laws and policy proposals call for regulators to make use of the information reflected in market prices. We focus on a leading example of such a proposal, namely that bank supervision should make use of the market prices of traded bank securities. We study the theoretical underpinnings...

We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

Theoretical work in financial economics suggests that payoff complementarities lead to financial fragility. Indeed, phenomena like bank runs and currency attacks are often attributed to the feature that investors are better off taking the same action taken by other investors. Due to data...

We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions. In this paper we study the incentives for information production when prices perform this allocational role. If firms cancel planned investments following...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions in the real sector. We argue in this paper that firms' overinvestment is sometimes necessary to induce speculators in financial markets to produce...