Knowledge that Transforms

Large U.S. banks dramatically increased their capitalization during the 1990s, to the highest levels in more than 50 years. We document this buildup of capital and evaluate several potential motivations. Our results support the hypothesis that regulatory innovations in the early 1990s weakened conjectural government guarantees and enhanced bank counterparties' incentives to monitor and price default risk. We find no evidence that a bank holding company's (BHC's) market capitalization increases with its asset volatility prior to 1994. Thereafter, the data display a strong cross-sectional relation between capitalization and asset risk.

I present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that negative information withheld by securities analysts is incorporated in stock prices with a significant delay. I estimate the extent of the withheld negative information based on the proportion of analysts who stop revising their annual earnings forecasts. This measure predicts negative earnings surprises and negative price reaction around earnings announcements. It could also be used to generate profitable trading strategies. I show that institutions tend to sell their stock holdings as my measure of unreported negative news increases, thus ameliorating the mispricing.

The tendency to introduce anonymity into financial markets apparently runs counter to the theory supporting transparency. This paper studies the impact of pre-trade transparency on liquidity in a market where risk-averse traders accommodate the liquidity demand of noise traders. When some risk-averse investors become informed, an adverse selection problem ensues for the others, making them reluctant to supply liquidity. Hence the disclosure of traders' identities improves liquidity by mitigating adverse selection. However, informed investors are effective liquidity suppliers, as their adverse selection and inventory costs are minimized. With endogenous information acquisition, transparency reduces the number of informed investors, thus decreasing liquidity. The type of information that traders hold and the effectiveness of insider trading regulation are crucial to distinguish between equilibria.