[This article analyzes the dynamic coordination problem among creditors of a firm with a time-varying fundamental and a staggered debt structure. In deciding whether to roll over his debt, each maturing creditor is concerned about the rollover decisions of other creditors whose debt matures during his next contract period. We derive a unique threshold equilibrium and characterize the roles of fundamental volatility, credit lines, and debt maturity in driving runs. In particular, we show that when fundamental volatility is sufficiently high, commonly used measures such as temporarily keeping the firm alive under runs and increasing debt maturity can exacerbate rather than mitigate runs.]

[This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. The heterogeneous expectations cause agents to take on speculative positions against each other and therefore generate endogenous relative wealth fluctuation. The relative wealth fluctuation amplifies asset price volatility and contributes to the time variation in bond premia. Our model shows that a modest amount of heterogeneous expectations can help explain several puzzling phenomena, including the "excessive volatility" of bond yields, the failure of the expectations hypothesis, and the ability of a tent-shaped linear combination of forward rates to predict bond returns.]

I study convergence traders with logarithmic utility in a continuous-time equilibrium model. In general, convergence traders reduce asset price volatility and provide liquidity by taking risky positions against noise trading. However, when an unfavorable shock causes them to suffer capital losses, thus eroding their risk-bearing capacity, they liquidate their positions, thereby amplifying the original shock. In extreme circumstances, this wealth effect causes convergence traders to be destabilizing in that they trade in exactly the same direction as noise traders. This situation is consistent with the near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998.

This paper uses segmented dual-class shares of Chinese firms—A shares traded in mainland China by local investors and H shares traded in Hong Kong by foreign investors—to document a rich pattern in the differential reactions of local and foreign investors to analyst recommendations. This pattern reveals that social connections between analysts and investors affect investor reactions to analyst recommendations. Because of the investors' differential reactions, analyst recommendations may exacerbate, rather than attenuate, the market segmentation between the two share classes.

We provide the first evidence on the performance of private operating firms as acquirers. Private bidders experience greater post-acquisition operating performance improvements compared to public bidders. This effect is not due to differences in target types, merger accounting, financing constraints, private equity ownership or subsequent listing of some private bidders, and is robust to instrumentation. Further analysis of governance arrangements at least partially attributes the private bidder effect to lower agency costs in private firms. Not only do private firms pay lower prices for target firm assets, they also operate them more efficiently by containing overhead costs and capital expenditures.

We study an information sale problem in which a monopolist proxy advisor sells recommendations to a firm’s shareholders for corporate voting. We find that even an unconflicted proxy advisor skews its recommendations based on its clients’ beliefs or preferences. A novel bias-quantity relationship affects firm value. Under some parameters, shareholders’ biased beliefs or preferences can lead shareholders to make more information purchases, which enhances their collective decision-making. Thus, firm value may increase despite the negative effects of biased proxy voting recommendations. JEL D82, G34, L15 Received: April 16, 2019; editorial decision March 25, 2020 by Editor Uday Rajan.

This study examines the presence of mispricing on Bondora, a leading European peer-to-peer lending platform, over the 2016–2019 period. By implementing machine learning methods, we measure the likelihood of success for loan resale on Bondora's secondary market and compare our predictions with the ex-post market outcomes. The differences observed uncover two phenomena which are related to the diverging perceptions of market participants on asset prices and associated fundamentals: some non-saleable assets are sold, while the resale of highly saleable assets is not successful. Sellers' pricing behaviour changes once they observe buyers' actions revealing the buyers' beliefs about the value of the asset. Our results are robust to various statistical and machine learning methods.

A number of authors have suggested that investors derive utility from realizing gains and losses on assets that they own. We present a model of this “realization utility,” analyze its predictions, and show that it can shed light on a number of puzzling facts. These include the disposition effect, the poor trading performance of individual investors, the higher volume of trade in rising markets, the effect of historical highs on the propensity to sell, the individual investor preference for volatile stocks, the low average return of volatile stocks, and the heavy trading associated with highly valued assets.

We investigate whether prospect theory preferences can predict a disposition effect. We consider two implementations of prospect theory: in one case, preferences are defined over annual gains and losses; in the other, they are defined over realized gains and losses. Surprisingly, the annual gain/loss model often fails to predict a disposition effect. The realized gain/loss model, however, predicts a disposition effect more reliably. Utility from realized gains and losses may therefore be a useful way of thinking about certain aspects of individual investor trading.