The existence and the enforcement of insider trading laws in stock markets is a phenomenon of the 1990s. A study of the 103 countries that have stock markets reveals that insider trading laws exist in 87 of them, but enforcement—as evidenced by prosecutions—has taken place in only 38 of them. Before 1990, the respective numbers were 34 and 9. We find that the cost of equity in a country, after controlling for a number of other variables, does not change after the introduction of insider trading laws, but decreases significantly after the first prosecution.

We arranged for trained undercover men and women to pose as potential clients and visit all 65 local financial advisory firms in Hong Kong. At financial planning firms, but not at securities firms, women were more likely than men to receive advice to buy only individual or only local securities. Female clients who signaled high confidence, high risk tolerance, or a domestic outlook were especially likely to receive this suboptimal advice. Our theoretical model explains these patterns as a result of statistical discrimination interacting with advisors’ incentives. Taste‐based discrimination is unlikely to explain the results.

We analyze the investment behavior of affiliated funds of mutual funds (AFoMFs), which are mutual funds that can only invest in other funds in the family, and are offered by most large families. Though never mentioned in any prospectus, we discover that AFoMFs provide an insurance pool against temporary liquidity shocks to other funds in the family. We show that, though the family benefits because funds can avoid fire sales, the cost of this insurance is borne by the investors in the AFoMFs. The paper thus uncovers some of the hidden complexities of fiduciary responsibility in mutual fund families.

Cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) computed around acquisition announcements are widely considered to be market‐based assessments of expected value creation. We show, however, that announcement returns do not correlate with commonly used and new measures of ex post outcomes. A simple characteristics‐based model using standard information known at the announcement date can predict these outcomes reasonably well, yet CAR even fails to capture the predictions from this model. Evidence suggests that information about the stand‐alone acquirer dominates CAR, making it virtually impossible to extract deal‐related information. We conclude that CAR is an unreliable measure of expected value creation.