Announcing a large fiscal stimulus may signal the government’s pessimism about the severity of a recession to the private sector, impairing the stabilizing effects of the policy. Using a theoretical model, we show that these signaling effects occur when the stimulus exceeds expectations and...

This paper provides evidence that a firm's stock price movements affect its customer demand. I develop a model in which customers learn about a firm's product quality partially from its stock price. This learning induces feedback from the price to customer demand. Furthermore, the firm manager...

This paper studies the joint determination of optimal contracts and equilibrium asset prices in an economy with multiple principal-agent pairs. Principals design optimal contracts that provide incentives for agents to acquire costly information. With agency problems, the agents' compensation...

We examine the role of earnings management in explaining the properties of asset prices and stock market participation. We demonstrate that investors' uncertainty about the extent of manipulation can cause excess movements in stock price relative to fluctuations in output. When faced with...

In a financial market where agents trade for short-term profit and where news can increase the uncertainty of the public belief, there are strategic complementarities in the acquisition of private information and, if the cost of information is sufficiently small, a continuum of equilibrium...

Recent studies suggest the transfer of privileged information via social ties but do not explicitly examine the cost of these ties to shareholders. We document a significant, positive relation between stock transaction costs and a company's social ties to the investment community. Social ties...

Revisions of consensus forecasts of macroeconomic variables positively predict announcement day forecast errors, whereas stock market returns on forecast revision days negatively predict announcement day returns. A dynamic noisy rational expectations model with periodic macroeconomic...

In environments with expected utility, it has long been established that speculative trade cannot occur (Milgrom and Stokey), and that the value of public information is negative in economies with risk-sharing and no aggregate uncertainty (Hirshleifer, Schlee). We show that these results are...

Can prices convey information about the fundamental value of an asset? This paper considers this problem in relation to the dynamic properties of the fundamental (whether it is constant or time-varying) and the structure of information available to agents. Risk-averse traders receive two...

We study information acquisition in dealer markets. We first identify a one-sided strategic complementarity in information acquisition: the more informed traders are, the larger market makers' gain from becoming informed. When quotes are observable, this effect in turn induces a strategic...