Abstract This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence on the ability of a host of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that when information is short-lived, only absolute order imbalance and effective spread are statistically and economically robust predictors of illegal insider trading. However, when information is long-lasting, insiders strategically time their trades to avoid illiquidity, and none of the standard measures considered are reliable predictors, including bid-ask spreads, order imbalance, Kyle’s λ, and Amihud illiquidity. (JEL D53D82G12G14K42) Received: March 14, 2019; Editorial decision: February 18, 2020 by Editor Thierry Foucault. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

This paper exploits a novel hand-collected data set to provide a comprehensive analysis of the social relationships that underlie illegal insider trading networks. I find that inside information flows through strong social ties based on family, friends, and geographic proximity. On average, inside tips originate from corporate executives and reach buy-side investors after three links in the network. Inside traders earn prodigious returns of 35% over 21 days, with more central traders earning greater returns, as information conveyed through social networks improves price efficiency. More broadly, this paper provides some of the only direct evidence of person-to-person communication among investors.

In contrast to the widely held belief that targets capture the lion's share of merger gains, I show that the average dollar gains to targets are only modestly more than the dollar gains to acquirers. To help explain the variation in merger outcomes, I present empirical evidence in support of a new hypothesis that a target's relative scarcity (proxied by its market power) and product market dependence (proxied by customer–supplier relations) help to explain its share of the total merger gains. These results provide new evidence for an unexplored role of product markets on bargaining outcomes in mergers.

Though common stocks are one of the most important assets in an economy, little is known about their demand curves. I estimate demand curves for 144 NYSE stocks using a unique data set of all orders, including off-equilibrium orders, during three months in 1990 and 1991. Connecting asset pricing with industrial organization, I find that stocks of firms in less competitive industries are more elastic because they have closer substitutes than stocks in more competitive industries. Tests that exploit the 1991 Gulf War shock and S&P 500 Index additions confirm these results.

The media has an incentive to publish sensational news. We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise. Conversely, less accurate stories use ambiguous language and feature well-known firms with broad readership appeal. Investors do not fully account for the predictive power of these characteristics, leading to an initial target price overreaction and a subsequent reversal, consistent with limited attention. Overall, we provide novel evidence on the determinants of media accuracy and its effect on asset prices.

The media has an incentive to publish sensational news. We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise. Conversely, less accurate stories use ambiguous language and feature well-known firms with broad readership appeal. Investors do not fully account for the predictive power of these characteristics, leading to an initial target price overreaction and a subsequent reversal, consistent with limited attention. Overall, we provide novel evidence on the determinants of media accuracy and its effect on asset prices.

ABSTRACT Firms have an incentive to manage media coverage to influence their stock prices during important corporate events. Using comprehensive data on media coverage and merger negotiations, we find that bidders in stock mergers originate substantially more news stories after the start of merger negotiations, but before the public announcement. This strategy generates a short‐lived run‐up in bidders' stock prices during the period when the stock exchange ratio is determined, which substantially impacts the takeover price. Our results demonstrate that the timing and content of financial media coverage may be biased by firms seeking to manipulate their stock price.

In 2003, a new law required that 40% of Norwegian firms' directors be women—at the time only 9% of directors were women. We use the prequota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin's Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance.

ABSTRACT We represent the economy as a network of industries connected through customer and supplier trade flows. Using this network topology, we find that stronger product market connections lead to a greater incidence of cross‐industry mergers. Furthermore, mergers propagate in waves across the network through customer‐supplier links. Merger activity transmits to close industries quickly and to distant industries with a delay. Finally, economy‐wide merger waves are driven by merger activity in industries that are centrally located in the product market network. Overall, we show that the network of real economic transactions helps to explain the formation and propagation of merger waves.

We find strong evidence that three key dimensions of national culture (trust, hierarchy, and individualism) affect merger volume and synergy gains. The volume of cross-border mergers is lower when countries are more culturally distant. In addition, greater cultural distance in trust and individualism leads to lower combined announcement returns. These findings are robust to year and country-level fixed effects, time-varying country-pair and deal-level variables, as well as instrumental variables for cultural differences based on genetic and somatic differences. The results are the first large-scale evidence that cultural differences have substantial impacts on multiple aspects of cross-border mergers.