Dislocations occur when financial markets, operating under stressful conditions, experience large, widespread asset mispricings. This study documents systematic dislocations in world capital markets and the importance of their fluctuations for expected asset returns. Our novel, model-free measure of these dislocations is a monthly average of hundreds of individual abnormal absolute violations of three textbook arbitrage parities in stock, foreign exchange, and money markets. We find that investors demand statistically and economically significant risk premiums to hold financial assets performing poorly during market dislocations, that is, when both frictions to the trading activity of speculators and arbitrageurs and their marginal utility of wealth are likely to be high.

[This study examines how heterogeneity of private information may induce financial contagion. Using a model of multi-asset trading in which the three main channels of contagion through financial linkages in the literature (correlated information, correlated liquidity, and portfolio rebalancing) are ruled out by construction, I show that financial contagion can still be an equilibrium outcome when speculators receive heterogeneous fundamental information. Risk-neutral speculators trade strategically across many assets to mask their information advantage about one asset. Asymmetric sharing of information among them prevents rational market makers from learning about their individual signals and trades with sufficient accuracy. Incorrect cross-inference about terminal payoffs and contagion ensue. When used to analyze the transmission of shocks across countries, my model suggests that the process of generation and disclosure of information in emerging markets may explain their vulnerability to financial contagion.]

This study investigates the notion that agency-driven information asymmetry may affect a firm’s stock liquidity. I postulate that less uncertainty about managerial agency problems may enhance liquidity provision by lowering dealers’ perceived adverse selection risk from trading with better-informed speculators. Consistent with my conjecture, I find that the staggered adoption of antitakeover provisions across U.S. states in the 1980s and 1990s — a plausibly exogenous shock unambiguously reducing the threat of (and speculators’ information advantage about) value-enhancing intervention — robustly improves the stock liquidity of affected firms relative to peer firms, especially at prior high fundamental or agency uncertainty and with poor governance.

[We study the role played by private and public information in the process of price formation in the U.S. Treasury bond market. To guide our analysis, we develop a parsimonious model of speculative trading in the presence of two realistic market frictions-information heterogeneity and imperfect competition among informed traders-and a public signal. We test its equilibrium implications by analyzing the response of two-year, five-year, and ten-year U.S. bond yields to order flow and real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. We find strong evidence of informational effects in the U.S. Treasury bond market: unanticipated order flow has a significant and permanent impact on daily bond yield changes during both announcement and nonannouncement days. Our analysis further shows that, consistent with our stylized model, the contemporaneous correlation between order flow and yield changes is higher when the dispersion of beliefs among market participants is high and public announcements are noisy.]

Direct government intervention in a market may induce violations of the law of one price in other, arbitrage-related markets. I show that a government pursuing a nonpublic, partially informative price target in a model of strategic market-order trading and segmented dealership generates equilibrium price differentials among fundamentally identical assets by clouding dealers’ inference about the targeted asset’s payoff from its order flow, to an extent complexly dependent on existing price formation. I find supportive evidence using a sample of American Depositary Receipts and other cross-listings traded in the major U.S. exchanges, along with currency interventions by developed and emerging countries between 1980 and 2009. Received May 18, 2016; editorial decision May 10, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

Dislocations occur when financial markets, operating under stressful conditions, experience large, widespread asset mispricings. This study documents systematic dislocations in world capital markets and the importance of their fluctuations for expected asset returns. Our novel, model-free measure of these dislocations is a monthly average of hundreds of individual abnormal absolute violations of three textbook arbitrage parities in stock, foreign exchange, and money markets. We find that investors demand statistically and economically significant risk premiums to hold financial assets performing poorly during market dislocations, that is, when both frictions to the trading activity of speculators and arbitrageurs and their marginal utility of wealth are likely to be high.

This study examines how heterogeneity of private information may induce financial contagion. Using a model of multi-asset trading in which the three main channels of contagion through financial linkages in the literature (correlated information, correlated liquidity, and portfolio rebalancing) are ruled out by construction, I show that financial contagion can still be an equilibrium outcome when speculators receive heterogeneous fundamental information. Risk-neutral speculators trade strategically across many assets to mask their information advantage about one asset. Asymmetric sharing of information among them prevents rational market makers from learning about their individual signals and trades with sufficient accuracy. Incorrect cross-inference about terminal payoffs and contagion ensue. When used to analyze the transmission of shocks across countries, my model suggests that the process of generation and disclosure of information in emerging markets may explain their vulnerability to financial contagion.

[Using a novel information asymmetry index based on measures of adverse selection developed by the market microstructure literature, we test whether information asymmetry is an important determinant of capital structure decisions, as suggested by the pecking order theory. Our index relies exclusively on measures of the market's assessment of adverse selection risk rather than on ex ante firm characteristics. We find that information asymmetry does affect the capital structure decisions of U. S. firms over the sample period 1973-2002. Our findings are robust to controlling for conventional leverage factors (size, tangibility, Q ratio, profitability), the sources of firms' financing needs, and such firm attributes as stock return volatility, stock turnover, and intensity of insider trading. For example, we estimate that on average, for every dollar of financing deficit to cover, firms in the highest adverse selection decile issue 30 cents of debt more than firms in the lowest decile. Overall, this evidence explains why the pecking order theory is only partially successful in explaining all of firms' capital structure decisions. It also suggests that the theory finds support when its basic assumptions hold in the data, as should reasonably be expected of any theory.]

We model and test for the role of heterogeneously informed, strategic multi-asset speculation for cross-price impact—the impact of trades in one asset on the prices of other (even unrelated) assets—in the U.S. stock market. Our investigation of the trading activity in New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ) stocks between 1993 and 2004 reveals that, consistent with our model, (1) daily order imbalance in one industry or random stock has a significant, persistent, and robust impact on daily returns of other (even unrelated) industries or random stocks; (2) cross-price impact is often negative; and (3) both direct (i.e., an asset’s own) and absolute (i.e., unsigned) cross-price impact are smaller when speculators are more numerous, greater when market-wide dispersion of beliefs is higher, and greater among stocks dealt by the same specialist.