In this reply I describe the unraveling of transaction dates in several markets, including the labor market for new lawyers hired by large law firms. This and other markets illustrate that unraveling can occur in markets with competitive prices, that it can result in substantial inefficiencies, and that marketplace institutions play a role in restoring efficiency. All of these contradict the conclusions of Priest.

Drawing on uncommonly rich and representative data from the Colombian manufacturing census, this paper documents new empirical relationships between input prices, output prices, and plant size and proposes a model of endogenous input and output quality choices by heterogeneous firms to explain the observed patterns. The key empirical facts are that, on average within narrowly defined sectors, (1) larger plants charge more for their outputs and (2) larger plants pay more for their material inputs. The latter fact generalizes the well-known positive correlation between plant size and wages. Similar correlations hold between prices and export status. We show that the empirical patterns are consistent with a parsimonious extension of the Melitz (2003, “The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity,” Econometrica, 71, 1695–1725) framework to include endogenous choice of input and output quality. Using a measure of the scope for quality differentiation from Sutton (1998, Technology and Market Structure: Theory and History. Cambridge: MIT Press), we show that differences across sectors in the relationships between prices and plant size are consistent with our model. Available evidence suggests that differences in observable measures of market power do not provide a complete explanation for the empirical patterns. We interpret the results as supportive of the hypothesis that quality differences of both inputs and outputs play an important role in generating the price–plant size correlations.

We explore how allowing votes to be traded separately of shares may affect the efficiency of corporate control contests. Our basic set-up and the nature of the questions continue the work of Grossman and Hart (1980), Harris and Raviv (1988), and Blair, Golbe and Gerard (1989). We consider three cases with respect to the allowable price offers (for shares and for votes when they can be traded separately): unrestricted price offers, quantity-restricted price offers, and price offers contingent on winning. Our main results are characterizations of the equilibria and of the circumstances under which vote buying is harmful. We show that allowing votes to be traded separately of shares results in inefficiencies in all the cases we study. Similarly allowing quantity-restricted offers is also harmful, but allowing conditional offers is not in itself detrimental to efficiency. The paper also makes a methodological contribution to the analysis of takeover games with atomless shareholders. It provides a way of dealing with asymmetric equilibria that must be dealt with for a complete analysis and it proves existence of an equilibrium.

We model a long-run relationship as an infinitely repeated game played by two equally patient agents. In each period, the agents play an extensive-form stage game of perfect information with either locally non-conflicting interests or strictly conflicting interests. There is incomplete information about the type of Player 1, while Player 2's type is commonly known. We show that a sufficiently patient Player 1 can leverage Player 2's uncertainty about his type to secure his highest pay-off, compatible with Player 2's individual rationality, in any perfect Bayesian equilibrium of the repeated game.

This paper examines the relation between information differences across investors (i.e., information asymmetry) and the cost of capital and establishes that with perfect competition information asymmetry makes no difference. Instead, a firm’s cost of capital is governed solely by the average precision of investors’ information. With imperfect competition, however, information asymmetry affects the cost of capital even after controlling for investors’ average precision. In other words, the capital market’s degree of competition plays a critical role for the relation between information asymmetry and the cost of capital. This point is important to empirical research in finance and accounting.

We investigate whether quarterly earnings guidance by corporate takeover targets is associated with acquisition premiums. Regulators have expressed recurring concerns that quarterly guidance is associated with a misallocation of resources because it encourages management to focus on excessively short-term horizons. If so, firms providing quarterly guidance represent an acquisition opportunity for non-guiding firms because acquired resources can be redeployed towards more productive long-term uses. Based on prior research that finds value created by acquisitions accrues primarily to target shareholders, we predict that an expected increase in value from the termination of guidance will be observed in acquisition premiums. We find that, after controlling for the other determinants of acquisition gains, the premium paid for an acquired corporation is associated with the target's practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance. Consistent with our prediction, we find that no incremental premium is paid to acquire guiding targets when the bidding firm also provides guidance.

Hedge funds using Lehman as prime broker faced a decline in funding liquidity after the September 15, 2008 bankruptcy. We find that stocks held by these Lehman-connected funds experienced greater declines in market liquidity following the bankruptcy than other stocks; the effect was larger for ex ante illiquid stocks and persisted into the beginning of 2009. We find no similar effects surrounding the Bear Stearns failure, suggesting that disruptions surrounding bankruptcy explain the liquidity effects. We conclude that shocks to traders' funding liquidity reduce the market liquidity of the assets that they trade.