Knowledge that Transforms

Von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over terminal consumption can be inferred from wealth on a single sample path when markets are complete and returns follow a known law in a neoclassical investment problem in either a discrete-time i.i.d. binomial model or a continuous-time diffusion model with a Gaussian state variable. Numerical results suggest that useful information about preferences can be obtained from even a single noisy sample of monthly observations of a portfolio over 5 years.

A standard empirical finding is that expected changes in exchange rates and interest rate differentials across countries are negatively related, implying that uncovered interest rate parity is violated in the data. This article provides new empirical evidence that suggests that violations of uncovered interest rate parity, and its economic implications, depend on the sign of the interest rate differential. A framework related to term structure models is developed to account for the puzzling relationship between expected changes in exchange rates and interest rate differentials. Estimation results suggest that a particular term structure model can account for the puzzling empirical evidence.

This article develops theoretical insight into the threshold effect in expected volatility, which means that large shocks are less persistent in volatility than small shocks. The model uses the Kyle-Admati-Pfleiderer setup with liquidity traders, informed traders, and a market maker. Information is modeled as a GARCH process. It is shown that the GARCH process for information is transformed into a TARCH process (for "threshold GARCH") for the market price changes. Working with information flows allows one to derive implications for trading volume and market liquidity which provide the basis for a more complete test of the model.

[We develop a dynamic model of the adoption of financial innovations. Each period, firms decide whether or not to adopt an innovation of uncertain value, and the profitability of each period's adoptions reveals information about the innovation's value. We show that characteristics of financial innovation waves cited by critics as evidence of irrational excess are, in fact, consistent with fully rational behavior. We also show that social welfare is enhanced when more firms adopt innovations of questionable value and that financial intermediaries have an incentive to encourage such adoption.]

This article compares the predictions of finite-shareholder models of conditional and unconditional takeover offers with the outcomes of laboratory experiments. In addition to differentiating between types of offers, the experimental designs span small and large firms as well as different levels of offer premiums. It is found that in unconditional offers to large groups of subjects (28–40), the symmetric Nash equilibrium predicts observed tendering frequencies quite accurately. For other experimental designs, the results are mixed. The analysis of shareholder tendering strategies from the experiment yields insights into (i) the effects of takeover offer designs, (ii) the appropriateness of finite-shareholder models for research, and (iii) the costs of free riding when shareholders are nonatomistic.

A standard presumption of market microstructure models is that competition between risk-neutral market makers inevitably leads to price schedules that leave market makers zero expected profits conditional on the order flow. This article documents an important lack of robustness of this zero-profit result. In particular, we show that if traders can split orders between market makers, then market makers set less-competitive price schedules that earn them strictly positive profits and hence raise trading costs. Thus, this article can explain why somebody might willingly make a market for a stock when there are fixed costs to doing so. The analysis extends to a limit order book, which by its nature is split against incoming market orders: equilibrium limit order schedules necessarily yield those agents positive expected profits.

[This article develops and tests a structural model of intraday price formation that embodies public information shocks and microstructure effects. We use the model to analyze intraday patterns in bid-ask spreads, price volatility, transaction costs, and return and quote autocorrelations, and to construct metrics for price discovery and effective trading costs. Information asymmetry and uncertainty over fundamentals decrease over the day, although transaction costs increase. The results help explain the U-shaped pattern in intraday bid-ask spreads and volatility, and are also consistent with the intraday decline in the variance of ask price changes.]

This article builds a theory of financial system architecture. We ask: what is a financial market, what is a bank, and what determines the economic role of each? Starting with basic assumptions about primitives–the types of agents and the nature of informational asymmetries–we provide a theory that explains which agents coalesce to form banks and which trade in the capital market. It is shown that borrowers of higher observable qualities access the financial market. Moreover, a financial system in its infancy will be bank-dominated, and increased financial market sophistication diminishes bank lending.

The probability of entry and exit of dealers on the NASDAQ National Market (NNM) is significantly affected by trading intensity, volatility and the quoted bid-ask spread. Entry and exit of market makers is a pervasive phenomenon. Large-scale entry (exit) is associated with substantial declines (increases) in quoted end-of-day inside spreads, even after controlling for the effects of changes in volume and volatility. The spread changes are larger in magnitude for issues with few market makers; however, even for issues with a large number of market makers, substantial changes in quoted spreads take place. The results are consistent with the competitive model of dealer pricing.

Using the model structure of Easley and O'Hara (Journal of Finance, 47, 577–604), we demonstrate how the parameters of the market-maker's beliefs can be estimated from trade data. We show how to extract information from both trade and no-trade intervals, and how intraday and interday data provide information. We derive and evaluate tests of model specification and estimate the information content of differential trade sizes. Our work provides a framework for testing extant microstructure models, shows how to extract the information contained in the trading process, and demonstrates the empirical importance of asymmetric information models for asset prices.