Regulators globally are concerned that dark trading harms price discovery. We show that dark trades are less informed than lit trades. High levels of dark trading increase adverse selection risk on the lit exchange by increasing the concentration of informed traders. Using both high- and low-frequency measures of informational efficiency we find that low levels of non-block dark trading are benign or even beneficial for informational efficiency, but high levels are harmful. In contrast, we find no evidence that block trades in the dark impede price discovery.

We document significant reductions in corporate payouts-both dividends and (to a larger extent) share repurchases-during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Payout reductions are more likely in firms with higher leverage, more valuable growth options, and lower cash balances, i.e., those more susceptible to the negative consequences of an external financing shock. Moreover, firms appear to use the proceeds from the reduction in payout to maintain cash levels and to fund investment. These findings are consistent with the view that a shock to the supply of credit (net of demand effects) during the financial crisis increased the marginal benefit of cash retention, leading some firms to turn to payout reductions as a substitute form of financing.

We propose a model to capture the dynamics of asset returns, with periods of crises that are characterized by contagion. In the model, a jump in one region of the world increases the intensity of jumps both in the same region (self-excitation) as well as in other regions (cross-excitation), generating episodes of highly clustered jumps across world markets that mimic the observed features of the data. We develop and implement moment-based estimation and testing procedures for this model. The estimates provide evidence of self-excitation both in the US and the other world markets, and of asymmetric cross-excitation, with the US market typically having more influence on the jump intensity of other markets than the reverse. We propose filtered values of the jump intensities as a measure of market stress and examine their out-of-sample forecasting abilities.

We compare the payout policies of US industrials and banks over the past 30 years to better understand dividends, especially for banks. For industrials, dividends grow strongly after 2002, when the declining propensity to pay reverses. Banks have a higher and more stable propensity to pay dividends and resist cutting dividends as the 2007–2008 financial crisis begins. Before the crisis, increases in repurchases push payouts to historic levels. These findings are broadly consistent with the idea that banks use dividends to signal financial strength while agency costs of free cash flow better explain industrial payouts.

We investigate the dual notions that “dumb money” exacerbates well-known stock return anomalies and “smart money” attenuates these anomalies. We find that aggregate flows to mutual funds (dumb money) appear to exacerbate cross-sectional mispricing, particularly for growth, accrual, and momentum anomalies. In contrast, hedge fund flows (smart money) appear to attenuate aggregate mispricing. Our results suggest that aggregate flows to mutual funds can have real adverse allocation effects in the stock market and that aggregate flows to hedge funds contribute to the correction of cross-sectional mispricing.