In this paper we investigate the effects of informed trading (PIN) and information uncertainty in determining price momentum. We find that trading strategies based on buying high-uncertainty good-news stocks and shorting high-uncertainty bad-news stocks work well when limited to high-PIN stocks, while stocks with low-PIN do not exhibit price continuations, even when the uncertainty level of those stocks is high. In contrast, momentum returns are always significant for high-PIN stocks, irrespective of information uncertainty. Overall, we show that the informed trading effect is both independent of and stronger than that of information uncertainty in determining price momentum.

Target acquisitiveness stands out as one of the primary drivers of all the key aspects of the market for corporate takeovers: acquisition announcement returns, probability of deal success, propensity to acquire and be acquired. Acquisitive targets, though a small proportion of the sample, are responsible for half of the overall negative acquisition announcement returns. Our large body of empirical evidence consistently supports the view that the motivation behind acquisitions of acquisitive targets is defensive: acquirers “eat in order not to be eaten”.

In this paper, we make a liquidity adjustment to the consumption-based capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) and show that the liquidity-adjusted CCAPM is a generalized model of Acharya and Pedersen (2005). Using different proxies for transaction costs such as the effective trading costs measure of Hasbrouck (2009) and the bid-ask spread estimates of Corwin and Schultz (2012), we find that the liquidity-adjusted CCAPM explains a larger fraction of the cross-sectional return variations.

Short sellers actively exploit trading opportunities from insider sales. We argue that, in response to concern about potential order flow information leakage, insiders strategically disguise their order flows to escape trading competition. Our model predicts that, when short sellers are sensitive to order flow information, insiders are more likely to adopt a cautious trading strategy, i.e., splitting their trades over time. Empirically, we identify cautious trading by tracking consecutive transactions at the insider-strategy level. We find that, when anticipating intensive short selling potential, (1) insiders tend to trade cautiously; and (2) cautious insiders tend to reduce their initial trades. Overall, we highlight the strategic interaction between insiders and short sellers on the diffusion of order flow information.

Previous research has shown that leverage has a positive effect on wages. Using US state-level labour protection laws as an exogenous shock, we find that the adoption of the law alleviates the effect of leverage on wages. We show that the mitigating effect on the leverage-wage relationship is more pronounced for firms with strong employee bargaining power. Our study highlights the positive role played by labour protection laws in lowering firms’ labour costs and improving their financial flexibility, which complements the literature and advances our understanding of the broad implications of labour protection laws.