We study the price effects of changes to the S&P 500 index and document an asymmetric price response: There is a permanent increase in the price of added firms but no permanent decline for deleted firms. These results are at odds with extant explanations of the effects of index changes that...

The multitude of explanations for the January effect leaves the reader confused about its primary cause(s): is it tax-loss selling, window dressing, information, bid-ask bounce, or a combination of these causes? The confusion arises, in part, because evidence has generally been presented in...

We argue that short sellers affect prices in a significant and systematic manner. In particular, we contend that speculative short sales contribute to the weekend effect: The inability to trade over the weekend is likely to cause these short sellers to close their speculative positions on...

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...

Agency-cost models suggest that firms may pursue riskier strategies in times of financial distress. For example, stockholders of financially weak firms in industries where quality cannot be observed ex-ante have an incentive to compromise safety and quality to maximize current period profit....

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...

This article uses intraday data for the year 1992 to investigate the effect of trading halts on price discovery for stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The results show that the degree of benefits from trading halts depends on the types of halts and significance of the news items. It...