We investigate the role of information-based trading in affecting asset returns. We show in a rational expectation example how private information affects equilibrium asset returns. Using a market microstructure model, we derive a measure of the probability of information-based trading, and we estimate this measure using data for individual NYSE-listed stocks for 1983 to 1998. We then incorporate our estimates into a Fama and French ~1992! asset-pricing framework. Our main result is that information does affect asset prices. A difference of 10 percentage points in the probability of information-based trading between two stocks leads to a difference in their expected returns of 2.5 percent per year. ASSET PRICING IS FUNDAMENTAL to our understanding of the wealth dynamics of an economy. This central importance has resulted in an extensive literature on asset pricing, much of it focusing on the economic factors that influence asset prices. Despite the fact that virtually all assets trade in markets, one set of factors not typically considered in asset-pricing models are the features

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The returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated, in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long-only equity portfolios and mutual funds. In this paper, we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure, i.e., investments in securities that are not actively traded and for which market prices are not always readily available. For portfolios of illiquid securities, reported returns will tend to be smoother than true economic returns, which will understate volatility and increase risk-adjusted performance measures such as the Sharpe ratio. We propose an econometric model of illiquidity exposure and develop estimators for the smoothing profile as well as a smoothing-adjusted Sharpe ratio. For a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the TASS database, we show that our estimated smoothing coefficients vary considerably across hedge-fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure.

Financial markets appear to improve the allocation of capital. Across 65 countries, those with developed financial sectors increase investment more in their growing industries, and decrease investment more in their declining industries, than those with undeveloped financial sectors. The efficiency of capital allocation is negatively correlated with the extent of state ownership in the economy, positively correlated with the amount of firm-specific information in domestic stock returns, and positively correlated with the legal protection of minority investors. In particular, strong minority investor rights appear to curb overinvestment in declining industries.

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. The paper examines the case in which the capital market is populated by informed and uninformed investors. The uninformed try to extract information from informed investors' trades. This opens up the possibility that if informed investors are forced to sell emerging market securities to meet margin calls, for example, this action may be misread by the uninformed investors as signaling low returns in emerging markets. The paper presents a simple model in which this type of Wall Street confusion may result in a collapse in emerging markets' output. * A rough version of these notes was presented at the AEA 1999 New York Meetings, and at the Winter Camp in International Finance, organized by the Center for International Economics (University of Maryland) and the Faculty of Economics (Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia) in Cartagena, Colombia, January 7-11, 1999. I would like to acknowledge with thanks useful comments by Enrique Mendoza, Maury Obstfeld, and other seminar partici...

We analyze the decision of an agent with time inconsistent preferences to consume a good that exerts an externality on future welfare. The extent of the externality is initially unknown, but may be learned via a costless sampling procedure. We show that when the agent cannot commit to future consumption and learning decisions, incomplete learning may occur on a Markov perfect equilibrium path of the resulting intra-personal game. In such case, each agent’s incarnation stops learning for some values of the posterior distribution of beliefs and acts under self-restricted information. This conduct is interpreted as strategic ignorance. All equilibria featuring this property strictly Pareto dominate the complete learning equilibrium for any posterior distribution of beliefs.

Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We find that it significantly predicts future returns, whereas alternative measures such as turnover do not. Consistent with liquidity being a priced factor, unexpected liquidity shocks are positively correlated with contemporaneous return shocks and negatively correlated with shocks to the dividend yield. We consider a simple asset pricing model with liquidity and the market portfolio as risk factors and transaction costs that are proportional to liquidity. The model differentiates between integrated and segmented countries and time periods. Our results suggest that local market liquidity is an important driver of expected returns in emerging markets, and that the liberalization process has not fully eliminated its impact.

I have documented that target prices subsumed in downgrade recommendations are the most informative while target prices in coverage reiteration are the least informative. The First Call database enables me to extend the analysis to an intraday frequency. Conducting event studies using high frequency data, is even more critical given the advent of information technology systems has dramatically changed the landscape of stock trading. The modified approach to event study is relevant to the fast-changing trading environment in today’s capital market. For upgrades, there are significant positive market-adjusted returns lasting 20 minutes; for downgrades, there are significant negative market-adjusted returns lasting 25 to 35 minutes. By constructing portfolios on the basis of target price information measures (TP/P, ΔTP/TP-1 and ΔTP/P), I also document that the information subsumed in target price revision is more useful than target price alone. Furthermore, the dramatic rise in trading activity coupled with a shift in order imbalances implies that the market interprets recommendations with target price changes broadly as a liquidity event.