Despite a vast theoretical literature that builds on costly information acquisition, there is no direct evidence on the importance of information costs in investors’ private information choices. Using a large sample of Chinese mutual fund managers’ visits to firm headquarters and exploiting...

We test whether 1) institutional investors with concentrated international holdings outperform internationally diversified investors, and 2) foreign investors with information advantage, measured by cultural and geographic proximity to the target market, outperform other foreign investors. Using...

While international portfolios are still heavily biased towards home assets, the home bias has exhibited a clear downward trend in the last few decades. Interestingly, the underlying rise in foreign investment has been primarily directed to just a handful of OECD countries, and has not given...

Traditional portfolio theory predicts that investors' portfolios should be diversified across international markets. In contrast, empirical studies document that investors are more likely to invest in their home country and in foreign markets that are culturally similar to and geographically...

We model the role of dealers in information diffusion in over-the-counter (OTC) markets. A dealer maintains relationships with a network of both informed customers who trade to profit from private information pertaining to asset values and risk-averse liquidity customers who trade to meet...

Investors who use biased information from news media subsequently tend to make irrational decisions about acquiring firm-specific information compared to rational expectations. This model of information acquisition yields testable predictions that are verified by using a novel dataset. First,...

We analyze a model where different traders are informed of different fundamentals that affect the security value. We identify a source for strategic complementarities in trading and information acquisition: The aggressive trading on information about one fundamental reduces the uncertainty in...

We analyze a rational expectations equilibrium model to explore the implications of information networks for the financial market. When information is exogenous, social communication improves market efficiency. However, social communication crowds out information production due to traders'...

We introduce a novel geometry-based method of modelling information that encompasses entropy-based approaches. A key contribution is that we explicitly construct the optimal path to acquire information. The economic driver of this geometry-based framework is knowledge state dependent marginal...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...