I allow trading horizon heterogeneity across groups in a standard differential information model of a financial market. This approach can explain the well-established phenomenon that, after a public announcement, trading volume increases, more private information is incorporated into prices and volatility increases. In such environments, public information has the important secondary role of helping agents learn about the information of other agents. Therefore, whenever the correlation between the private information of different groups is sufficiently low, a public announcement increases disagreement among short-horizon traders regarding the expected selling price even as it decreases disagreement about the fundamental value of the asset. Additional testable implications are also suggested.

I develop an equilibrium model of convergence trading and its impact on asset prices. Arbitrageurs optimally decide how to allocate their limited capital over time. Their activity reduces price discrepancies, but their activity also generates losses with positive probability, even if the trading opportunity is fundamentally riskless. Moreover, prices of identical assets can diverge even if the constraints faced by arbitrageurs are not binding. Occasionally, total losses are large, making arbitrageurs' returns negatively skewed, consistent with the empirical evidence. The model also predicts comovement of arbitrageurs' expected returns and market liquidity.

We analyze the effects of the observed increased share of delegated capital for trading strategies and equilibrium prices by introducing delegation into a standard Lucas exchange economy. In equilibrium, some investors trade on their own account, but others decide to delegate trading to professional fund managers. Flow-performance incentive functions describe how much capital clients provide to funds at each date as a function of past performance. Convex flow-performance relations imply that the average fund outperforms the market in recessions and underperforms in expansions. When the share of capital that is delegated is low, all funds follow the same strategy. However, when the equilibrium share of delegated capital is high, funds with identical incentives employ heterogeneous trading strategies. A group of managers borrows to take on a levered position on the stock. Thus, fund returns are dispersed in the cross-section and the outstanding amounts of borrowing and lending increase. The relation between the share of delegated capital and the Sharpe ratio typically follows an inverse U-shaped pattern.

[We analyze the effects of the observed increased share of delegated capital for trading strategies and equilibrium prices by introducing delegation into a standard Lucas exchange economy. In equilibrium, some investors trade on their own account, but others decide to delegate trading to professional fund managers. Flow-performance incentive functions describe how much capital clients provide to funds at each date as a function of past performance. Convex flow-performance relations imply that the average fund outperforms the market in recessions and underperforms in expansions. When the share of capital that is delegated is low, all funds follow the same strategy. However, when the equilibrium share of delegated capital is high, funds with identical incentives employ heterogeneous trading strategies. A group of managers borrows to take on a levered position on the stock. Thus, fund returns are dispersed in the cross-section and the outstanding amounts of borrowing and lending increase. The relation between the share of delegated capital and the Sharpe ratio typically follows an inverse U-shaped pattern.]

We model trading and information diffusion in OTC markets, when dealers can engage in many bilateral transactions at the same time. We show that information diffusion is effective, but not efficient. While each bilateral price partially reveals all dealers' private information after a single round of trading, dealers could learn more even within the constraints imposed by our environment. This is not a result of dealers' market power, but arises from the interaction between decentralization and differences in dealers' valuation of the asset. We apply our framework to confront several explanations for the disruption of OTC markets with stylized facts from the empirical literature. We find more support for narratives emphasizing increased counterparty risk as opposed to increased informational frictions.

We propose a model of delegated portfolio management with career concerns. Investors hire fund managers to invest their capital either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on default risk. Based on past performance, investors update beliefs on managers and make firing decisions. This leads to career concerns that affect managers' investment decisions, generating a countercyclical “reputational premium.” When default risk is high, return on bonds is high to compensate uninformed managers for the high risk of being fired. As default risk changes over time, the reputational premium amplifies price volatility.

Endogenous cycles emerge through the two-way interaction between lending standards and production fundamentals. Lax lending standards in booms lead to low interest rates and high output but the deterioration of future loan quality. Low borrower quality in turn precipitates tight standards: the economy enters a recession with high credit spreads and low output but a gradual improvement in the quality of loans. This eventually triggers a shift back to a boom with lax lending, and the cycle continues. The capitalization of expert investors determines the strength of capital reallocation in recessions. Furthermore, although the constrained efficient economy is often cyclical, it features both a static and a dynamic externality in credit supply, hence differing from the decentralized equilibrium.

We propose a dynamic model of investment and trade in a market of a specialized technology subject to two main frictions. First, agents cannot raise outside capital. Second, a random group of agents will have the opportunity to invest in new technology and these opportunities are not contractible. The first friction implies the presence of invesment cycles with abundant invesment and low returns in booms and little invesment and high returns in recessions. Only when the second friction is present invesment cycles are constrained inefficient. Often the inefficiency is two-sided with too much invesment in booms and too little in recessions from a social point of view. Interventions targetting only the underinvesment in recessions might make all agents worse off. Also, the two-sided inefficiency typically implies too volatile prices and too frequent realizations of abnormally low prices compared to fundamentals.

We investigate the heterogeneous boom and bust patterns across countries that emerge as a result of global shocks. Our analysis sheds light on the emergence of core and periphery countries, and the joint determination of the depth of recessions and tightness of credit markets across countries. The model implies that interest rates are similar across core and periphery countries in booms, with larger credit and output growth in periphery countries. However, a common global shock that leads to a credit crunch across the globe gives rise to a sharper spike in interest rates and a deeper recession in periphery countries, while a credit flight to the core alleviates the adverse consequences in these countries. We explore the implication of the model about credit spreads, portfolio rebalancing, investment, non-performing debt and concentration of debt ownership during booms and busts, both in the time series and in the cross-section, and connect them to existing stylized facts. We further demonstrate how the anatomy of the global economy evolves as a result of aggregate demand and supply shocks to financing, such as a global saving glut.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This paper studies the effect of hedge-fund trading on idiosyncratic risk. We hypothesize that while hedge-fund activity would often reduce idiosyncratic risk, high initial levels of idiosyncratic risk might be further amplified due to fund loss limits. Panel-regression analyses provide supporting evidence for this hypothesis. The results are robust to sample selection and are further corroborated by a natural experiment using the Lehman bankruptcy as an exogenous adverse shock to hedge-fund trading. Hedge-fund capital also explains the increased idiosyncratic volatility of high-idiosyncratic-volatility stocks as well as the decreased idiosyncratic volatility of low-idiosyncratic-volatility stocks over the past few decades.